“... as a critic. Agee was not interested in teaching his audience, as Shaw and Mencken and Edmund Wilson were interested, and as his colleagues at the Nation Clement Greenberg and B.H. Haggin were. He does not drive home an argument and avoids underlining the implications of a perception. Rather, he will broadly sketch a chosen compliment, travesty, explosive ...”

“... in English Literature at Berkeley. While still at college, she wrote an article on the architect Wilson Wurster that won Vogue’s Prix de Paris award. That took her to New York in 1956. It was the first time she had been there, and she was wearing ‘a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old ...”

“... to stray into his territory. Indeed, he goes out of his way to say that ‘I did not do a Harold Wilson and publicly criticise Mervyn, even when on further occasions he volunteered advice on our fiscal policy.’ All he will say is that he called him in for a private chat, and reminded him of their understanding ‘that I would not comment on monetary policy ...”

“... a radical departure from the way we have traditionally viewed our reciprocal relationships. David Marquand, in what is properly the opening essay of the book, argues that hitherto the Left has been possessed by the same ‘reductionist individualism’ as the Right. The result was a ‘paradox’: social democracy could exist only within communitarian ...”

“... popular films featuring notable individual male characters as Goodbye, Mr Chips, Citizen Kane, Wilson, Casablanca and Henry V.’ This is ‘coverage’, and we feel that his heart is not quite in it. It would appear that, when writing about his war, Fussell finds it difficult to spread himself around. As he once testified, he is ‘really a pissed-off ...”

“... utterly dishonest – and this is as good as people get in his world. Like Poe’s Pym or William Wilson, Thompson’s characters endure only so long as they dissemble; once they admit to who they really are, they’re reduced to their essential constituent parts – a spattering of raw flesh, an aimless cry in the dark. These are truly visceral ...”

“... did Mr Murdoch a huge service when it published the full text of Lord McGregor’s letter to Sir David Calcutt. In that remarkable document the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission exposed the degree to which the Princess of Wales actively stoked up press interest in the state of her marriage. What is more, it turned out that the facts contained in ...”

“... and as long as our environmental consciousness is tied to the idea of breathtaking scenery or David Attenborough’s ramblings about charismatic fauna, we will be satisfied with the preservation of beautiful symbols. Activists chain themselves to trees while Coca-Cola appeases guilty consciences by printing some arrows in a Möbius loop on the label of a ...”

“... in for the kill as their old middlebrow bête noire found itself middle-aged and broke. Harold Wilson and Spike Milligan joined forces to save it, but the D’Oyly Carte Company sank in 1982, scuppered by the Arts Council. The hope and expectation clearly was that the whole show would vanish with it. HMS Pinafore would go down with the last of the ...”

“... another example of ‘to fire out’ meaning what it is here taken to mean, and I notice that David and Ben Crystal, in their new glossary Shakespeare’s Words,* do not admit the venereal sense, giving only ‘to drive away by fire’. The poet is not even sure the parties have slept together, and could only have been certain of the consequence accepted ...”

“... to 2 p.m. MPs had to come from their constituencies a.m. and get back to evening meetings p.m.! David Stod-dart (Swindon) had the foresight to see that a three-hour debate would keep out most backbenchers, and called a division suggesting it should be a five-hour debate. Defeated! The end-result was two hours and 40 minutes. With four Front Bench speeches ...”

“... zones’ across the territory it seized – territory which the UK’s current foreign secretary, David Lammy, has referred to as having been ‘liberated’. Gary Jones, BP’s regional president for Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, has used similar language, telling an audience at Energy Week 2022 that Karabakh is the ‘perfect opportunity for a fully ...”

“... fans will recognise the old cast of characters, those almost-forgotten names – Charles Colson, David Young, Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh – and there is pleasure in this: a bit like watching an old horror film on late-night TV. Yet on that level Mr Hersh is not exciting. We know the Watergate story from every angle and, by now, from the memoirs of almost every ...”

“... but it did not fundamentally change its course. Like that of his longer lived contemporary David Jones (born five years after Rosenberg, in 1895), Rosenberg’s writing displays a sense of the continuity between a past passionately experienced through poetry and spiritual tradition, and a nearly intolerable present. Rosenberg’s parents were Russian ...”

“... as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of 1912 proposed to renew entrepreneurial opportunities through anti-trust and regulatory policies. He recalls a certain kind of populist progressive: distrustful of big business but also of big government, except as a regulator ...”