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“... would be acceptable to the public. But politicians weren’t blameless. ‘All prime ministers love intelligence,’ the diplomat Nicholas Henderson claimed: it allows them to believe that they have a ‘direct line to something that no other ordinary departments have’. At the beginning it all looked innocent enough. GCHQ grew out of the Government Code ...”

“... on his Fulbright trip to Germany; about his relationships with women, and with the spectres of Harold Bloom and Pynchon. He writes about envy, and how it encourages productivity, and how it limits productivity, and about the folly of the very notion of artistic productivity. He writes against blogs, yet allows a comparison between Die Fackel and blogs; he ...”

“... just as wary of those today who look for the ultimate explanation of morality – not to mention love, sex, religion and art – in brain scans and evolutionary just-so stories. ‘It is increasingly evident that moral standards, practices and policies reside in our neurobiology,’ the ‘neurophilosopher’ Patricia Churchland claims. ‘Our moral nature ...”

“... whose key ambition continues to be expansion, as well as to be on the right side diplomatically. Harold Laski diagnosed Motherland two-partyism long ago, pointing out that any ins-and-outs system could work only by extensive agreement between the parties – a ‘de facto’ one-party national order where the common ground was all-important. Stability and ...”

“... a Pink Toothbrush, You’re a Blue Toothbrush,’ because the guru Max Bygraves helped me see that love doesn’t mind if you’re different. I liked ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’ because there was no resisting the idea of mice in clogs. I liked Lonnie Donegan’s ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ because it meant I could sing in Cockney . . . I liked ...”

“... of Longmuir’s minibar. Many elements of Maudling’s story are present in this vignette: his love of the good life for himself and, especially, for Beryl; his likeability and accessibility to journalists who, as a result, long protected him; his ever-worsening alcoholism; and his insistence on a style of living which he could not afford and which drove ...”

“... on the spectrum of animal sex; and even more troubling perhaps to think that the whole idea of love, the rock on which contemporary secular metaphysics is founded, is a sexual gimmick peculiar to our species – one at which the other animals can snigger and wonder just as we wonder at their prickly penises and hermaphrodite penetration duels. Wary of the ...”

“... a bit. His arrogance sometimes turned belligerent. Beyond that, it’s just gossip. Did Greenberg love Helen Frankenthaler because he admired her painting, or vice versa? Does it matter? Only in reminding us that life inflects both art and criticism more than Greenberg would have liked. He announced several times that biography, while interesting, didn’t ...”

“... were heterosexual but that he repressed them as one sacrifice to his political career, his first love and his consuming passion. His women friends had to endure a form of joking relationship which he characteristically established by refusing to compliment them on their appearance, and by abstaining from ordinary courtesies, still less flattery, least of all ...”

“... of The Dance of Death, unclassified on its title page, though indicated within, was endorsed by Harold Hobson in 1933 as ‘that most frivolous of entertainments, the musical comedy’, here transformed into an instrument for serious drama, ‘as though one were to see No, No, Nanette taken, without incongruity, as the mouthpiece for a 20th-century Contrat ...”

“... his health was destroyed, his dependence on opium crippling, his marriage all to pieces, his love for Sara Hutchinson frustrated, his collaboration with Wordsworth curdling into a matter of jealous resentment, the poetry for which we chiefly remember him all in the past, his hopes and his reasons for hope decayed. He was not yet at the ...”

“... from the top of the tower block which stands in the middle of the Caltech campus. It read: ‘WE LOVE YOU DICK.’ The obituary of Feynman in the LA Times was awed and affectionate. It listed his achievements – his work in physics, the Nobel Prize it earned him and his work on the nuclear bomb. It also recalled his reputation as a womaniser, a drummer and ...”

“... set off in an amazing way.’ So artists loved the way Fraser treated their work; they didn’t love the way he treated them. They all complain about the difficulty or impossibility of getting paid. Clive Barker spells out the most maddening part of it: In the mid-1960s Robert would say to me, ‘I’ll give you that money when I see you.’ But he ...”

“... for instance, as children both used thieving as a way of securing their mothers’ exclusive love. Lewis’s quest for extreme sensations perhaps mirrors his creator’s impatience with the complacencies of the Wasp milieu in which he grew up (private schools in Manhattan and Massachusetts, followed by Princeton and Harvard, from which he graduated with ...”

“... Graham Greene was more than half in love with easeful failure. He chose to end A Sort of Life, the sly memoir of his early years that stood in for an autobiography, with ‘the years of failure which followed the acceptance of my first novel’, adding the characteristic gloss that ‘failure too is a kind of death’ and so may conclude the story of a life as appropriately as one’s last breath ...”