“... the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered the secret world ‘in the spirit of John Buchan and left it in the spirit of Kafka’; allowing for quite a lot of exaggeration at both ends, it’s a reasonable comment on The Spy who Came in from the ...”

“... better lives. Glenny’s book is a warning against such a simple view. No, big gangsters are not nice people: they get what they want through the threat or ultimate use of violence and blackmail. And it’s obvious that their operations can wreck the lives of millions through addiction or – as in the Balkans or Colombia – through the equipping and ...”

“... to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the baby had not caused offence, so was not painted out, with the result that a naked and strangely breasted Dawson is now seen feeding the child. Freud’s American dealer assumed the picture would be unsellable; it was bought by the first ...”

“... what made him a winner. Hamilton’s memoir establishes beyond doubt that Armstrong is not a nice person to be around. His take-no-prisoners approach to all aspects of competition made him devious, insensitive and cruel. He bullied his teammates and then, when they showed signs of resistance, replaced them with someone more pliant. Hamilton was forced ...”

“... and wanting and imagining, retained a kind of grandeur, a little big-time glamour – the sheen of nice frocks, the glint of trophies – which has never attached itself to other mass gambling pursuits like the football pools (unless, of course, you’re talking about a strictly Page Three sort of glamour). In a side-chapel of the Natural History Museum, next ...”

“... We would like some examples of ‘the witty and highbrow artistic references’ which her friends, David and Jeremy, bandied about. But all we hear of Jeremy’s thoughts, when he and Rosie ‘tumble’ into bed, is that he thinks ‘fate had brought them together and they’d met in another lifetime.’ Jeremy is respectfully described as a ‘Cambridge ...”

“... Similarities and differences in the equipment evolved by shepherds in various countries reflect a nice adjustment to the particular type of animal bred, to the local environment and to changing technology. The mystery of the domestication of the sheep remains. In retrospect, it was among the most vulnerable of mammals to carnivores, to hunting pressures, and ...”

“... were part of it. Harold Nicolson also made a social judgment – though he found Lindbergh ‘as nice as can be’. He described him as ‘like a bright, young chauffeur’. Ludovic Kennedy draws attention to a disagreeable side of Lindbergh’s character: a taste for aggressive practical jokes. But he was fearless, and an inspired mechanic. When he took off ...”

“... to her career tell us much more about ourselves than they do about her. We did not hear from David Cameron that she eventually became an embarrassment to the Conservative Party. Before the great banking bust of 2008, which owed much to her policies, he had ditched her and her legacy. No one pointed out either that, despite her well-known convictions and ...”

“... Divorcing was reissued by New York Review Books in 2020 with an introduction by Sontag’s son, David Rieff. Lament for Julia is now available for the first time, along with nine of her short stories. Taubes’s fiction is autobiographical. She writes female protagonists who are daughters of psychoanalysts or trapped in fluorescently unhappy marriages or ...”

“... American writer deserving revival, but they take very different approaches to her life and work. David Roberts was mesmerised by this ‘enigmatic, thwarted writer’ and sought to unravel her story with the help of Eve Auchincloss, Stafford’s friend and editor, and her 42-year correspondence with ex-lover and friend Robert Hightower. He paints a ...”

“... prints interviews with them, as if they were as respectable as the Shah of Iran. Dickson mentions David Bailey, who published a handsome photograph of the Twins, with an eloquent caption by Francis Wyndham, comparing them with Humphrey Bogart. It was the little public-school gang of Private Eye that broke through the hype: larger journals seemed awed by the ...”

“... value for Britons. Apart from the fascination of looking on at someone else’s quarrels (’such nice people, really, but don’t you just love a good row?’), there is great value in an alternative hearing of debates that also bicker on this side of the Atlantic. And I am grateful, so very grateful to Professor Wilson for not writing with the dystrophied ...”

“... more dramatic than in Miami, a great resort and retirement capital for the Northeast, now – as David Rieff puts it in Going to Miami – a mirror city to Havana. There have been no less than five recent books on Miami, of which those by Rieff and Joan Didion,* quite different in tone and treatment, are the most prominent. Miami has also become crucial to ...”

“... but esoteric science. The part of Bill Clinton is here played by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist David Baltimore and the junior female colleague is not Monica Lewinsky but a Japanese-Brazilian-American immunologist named Thereza Imanishi-Kari. Their relations are not sexual but wholly collegial. The out-of-control independent counsel is not Kenneth Starr but ...”