“... to put his own spin on the tragedy – and, indeed, on the romance. Within days of the car crash, Michael Cole – al-Fayed’s ultra-Brit PR man – was feeding the newspapers sugary tidbits from the couple’s final hours. Diana, he said, had given Dodi a pair of cufflinks that had once belonged to her father. Dodi had responded with a ‘Tell me ...”

“... London correspondent for the New Yorker, put it) would be impossible to say. When Edmund Wilson visited England in 1956 he was struck by how well-regulated life seemed: ‘In spite of the developments since the last war,’ he wrote, ‘the social system is still largely taken for granted, and it is soothing for an American to arrive in a place where ...”

“... Davie’s kind, the scope widens rapidly outward from there. Our best living Shakespeare critic, Wilson Knight, has claimed Henry VIII as a great Christian drama; it would not be precisely the play that I would choose, but a similar kind of case could be made for, say, the gaol scene in Cymbeline as among the most original Christian writing of the late ...”

“... are the few Englishmen in British India who gave aid to nationalists or Communists. One of them, Michael Carritt, has written a light-hearted account of his brief career in the Indian Civil Service.4 At vastly greater risk, a few Frenchmen in Algeria gave aid secretly to the rebels. Admirable too, though unlikely to be admired by Tories or Reaganites, is the ...”

“... Tory Party between ‘stricken patricians and over-confident arrivistes’. But then he turns to Michael Foot and – too furious to be consistent – denies him any protection from this ‘tool-of-social-forces’ approach. Instead, Foot gets both barrels fired straight at his moral sensorium, and the shotgun thrown at his head as well. ‘Foot was ...”

“... Plame case excluded). All this, until recently, with popular assent and elite approval.Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore, his book about America’s Civil War and about an American obsession with war, said of the literature on this conflict that never before had Americans found themselves so articulate while also failing to convey any sense of what actually ...”

“... was well put by one of the first grown-up critics to write about detective fiction, Edmund Wilson, in his 1945 essay-review, ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Her writing is of a mawkishness and banality that seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot ...”

“... of biomass over biodiversity, environmentalism over ecology proper. Apologists for what Edward O. Wilson has termed ‘the prosthetic environment’ picture nature as a controllable steady gate – a model which lends itself to idioms drawn from good housekeeping (knowing what is in the global larder) and good living (the environment as still-life, as ...”

“... people thought that there was something too convenient about the Lusitania for President Woodrow Wilson, and too easy about Pearl Harbour for President Franklin Roosevelt – both of these, incidentally, hypotheses which later Churchill historians are finding harder to dismiss – but such arguments had been subsumed in the long withdrawing roar of American ...”

“... between judicious sips of bottled water. Friends of the playwright Lillian Hellman, whom Edmund Wilson would describe in his journals as the queen bee of the Martha’s Vineyard ‘cocktail belt’, Styron and Rose would become champion party-throwers themselves up in Roxbury, Connecticut, between work-slogs. But by the year of Kazin’s Christmas ...”

“... of Corfu. There are several different versions of Mosley’s political career. Fellow politicians, Michael Foot and Richard Crossman among them, took the view that, like themselves, he was interested in power but that, unlike them, unlike Foot and Crossman at any rate, he was too impatient to wait his turn. For Skidelsky, though there are signs that he may now ...”

“... that or return the publisher’s advance), calling his debut Doings and Undoings. The columnist Michael Kinsley once observed that Al Gore was an old person’s idea of a young person, and Podhoretz was an old critic’s version of a young critic, publishing in the proper publications and bemoaning hairy barbarians like the Beats (‘The Know-Nothing ...”

“... that here we would all do well to bear in mind something an experienced Wall Street investor told Michael Lewis: ‘When I hear “Chinese wall” I think “you’re a fucking liar.”’ If I sound cynical and unsurprised about the manipulation of Libor, that’s because I long since stopped believing assurances of ethical conduct on the part of the ...”

“... National Guard to be sent to Central America at a time when other Democratic governors, such as Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, were refusing the poisoned chalice. Indeed, it was Clinton’s flexibility in the matter of this criminal and covert war (not unlike his subsequent haste to change sides and be on the winning side in the Gulf conflict) that won ...”

“... to called it theirs. ‘The first time I met Rosemary she was with the Shankhill Help,’ said Wilson Free-burn, with a mug of tea in front of him. ‘It was 12 years ago and we had no money and I was involved in community relations and she was trying to give Citizens Advice.’ He stared into the Formica. ‘She had sparkle you know – and she never ...”