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“... were among the starving and not the rich, would think just. Cohen himself was always disarmingly frank about the ‘peculiarity’, as he used to put it, of being an Oxford professor preaching radical egalitarianism from the cloistered luxury of All Souls. But what has that to do with the strength or weakness of his arguments? There is always some easy fun ...”

“... gangsters were left – and because this book draws its own line at 1948 we get too little of Robert Stroud (the ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’, portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the film of the same name), the prisoner who made the most of his incarceration. There would be one more escape, in 1960. Frank Morris and the Anglin ...”

“... and adventure’ were absent. Being funny is not part of the reputation of either of them. But Frank Kermode went so far as to call Diana the writer ‘among other things, a comedian’, and we can ask how many ardent anti-communists would say about Trotsky, as Diana did: ‘He was such an intellectual … he wrote such good prose; and he made fun of ...”

“... you imagined I might be some day). This thought was very disagreeable to me.Wittgenstein to Frank Ramsey:A thing which is of much greater importance to me & was so on Saturday evening, is, that I still can’t understand how, being my supervisor & even – as I thought – to some extent my friend, having been very good to me you couldn’t care two ...”

“... writes as pungently as anyone in modern journalism, but he has a weekly column to sustain, and Robert Maxwell is by no means as anxious about the fate of the Belgrano as he is about the costs of the Falklands, or the welfare of the Polish Government. Like Mr Foot, John Rentoul of the New Statesman has contributed some crucial articles – turning-points in ...”

“... driven them into the arms of the deep state, whose prevaricating representatives – in particular Robert Mueller, who before being appointed as special investigator into alleged Trump-Russia collusion was the longest-serving director of the FBI since J. Edgar Hoover – have been transformed by the mainstream media into paragons of integrity. Why these people ...”

“... reading the newspapers of the time can have something of the same effect, as is well conveyed by Robert Kee’s The World We Left behind. But it’s not the same as a single person’s day-by-day account of – not, of course, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, but – what it eigentlich felt like to that person. The dilemma is whether publication should or ...”

“... problem’ to one of technical implementation. We learn as much from that peerless technocrat Hans Frank, in an article on ‘Technik des Staates’ in the 1941 volume of Zeitschrift der Akademie für Deutsches Recht – an organ whose very name, in context, offers a deathless essay in the sardonic. The tie that binds SS Russian Front vets with the likes of ...”

“... than something to be envied; in the heyday of ‘lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals’ (Frank O’Hara), the New Yorker was not viewed as a particularly serious publisher of poetry. Appearing there did nothing to contradict Bishop’s self-stylisation as a ‘poet by default’: ‘I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it ...”

“... later reflected, that he had had an experienced mentor to call on for advice – someone such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who ‘had always seemed to me “one of the family”’. Greene was distantly related to RLS through his mother’s cousin. ‘Names which appeared in his Collected Letters were photographs in our family album. In the nursery we played ...”

“... Lubies d’ Arthur but similarly imagined, Des aveugles is about a young blind couple, Josette and Robert, who live in an institution for the blind. When another blind man, Taillegeur, falls in love with Josette, he sets up an elaborate series of obstacles designed to kill Robert, but ...”

“... Sun. (At least this was Rowland’s version of what was happening – Murdoch has denied it.) Robert Maxwell is trying to buy a 10 per cent share in Fleet Holdings from the, Australian tycoon Robert Holmes a Court for £15.4 million, while another bidder – it’s not clear whether or not he is a rival to Maxwell ...”

“... Robert​ Louis Stevenson was always ill, that’s what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England ...”

“... but that the few English critics who bother with theory are tourists: mid-Atlantic figures like Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner, or Francophiles like Stephen Heath and Stephen Bann. Samuel Johnson had moral principles, but nothing like a theory of literature: he didn’t need one. The force of English common sense is that it leaves you free to deal with the ...”

“... the Welfare State. ‘When Democracy builds’ was the title of an ardent and prophetic lecture by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ned’s near-contemporary. But, for Lutyens, democratic government could ‘only work through compromise, leaving its conscience in the hands of accountants’. Hospitals, schools, factories, cinemas and underground railway stations had no ...”