“... I recollect it) trounced his left-leaning discussants pretty decisively. When he arrived, the West Indian waitress looking after us went up to him with a big smile and said, ‘Can I believe my eyes?’ to which the expressionless reply was: ‘Gin and tonic, please.’ The second was when we were fellow guests with him, his wife and Mo Mowlam at dinner ...”

“... erupting in their primordial cruelty” is a dance staged for their eyes, a dance for which the West is thoroughly responsible.’ ‘I am convinced of my proper grasp of some Lacanian concept,’ Zizek writes, ‘only when I can translate it successfully into the inherent imbecility of popular culture.’ His works are awash with allusions to detective ...”

“... over her, making her all sex, and suffocating her. The Girl was a fiction and a mask – ‘Mae West, Theda Bara and Bo Peep all rolled into one’, said Groucho Marx – which served to turn a case of ordinary, everyday wishing into a triumph of calculated stardom. There is hardly a single area of Norma Jeane’s life that wasn’t fluffed up to enhance ...”

“... were, And lived lesse in awe; Now, God be thanked! People feare More to ofend the law. Anthony Munday, in his play The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington (1598), redated the hero to the end of the 12th century, which had ‘the remarkable effect of reversing his political tendency’. Munday makes Robin’s enemies ‘only the corrupt and the ...”

“... his intention to kidnap yet another girl outside a bookshop. More recent screen murderers – Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs or John Malkovich in practically anything – have tried to convey clinical control, as if the scariest thing were a killer unaffected by his own actions. Lorre himself was perfectly capable of playing this kind of ...”

“... the pub until it closed. The man with the greatest incentive to call ‘time’, his heir-apparent Anthony Eden, lacked the nerve and nastiness to do so. On numerous occasions Churchill toughed it out with his frustrated deputy, conning Eden into handling most of the Parliamentary business while he maintained titular leadership of the Party (and got on with ...”

“... became headmistress of a part-time vocational school offering classes to young female employees of West End drapery stores. Edwin, still affected by his experiences on Clydeside, was advised by Orage to consult the Jungian psychiatrist Maurice Nicoll, author of Dream Psychology. Son of a famous Scottish journalist and Free Kirk minister, Nicoll had recently ...”

“... call it ‘terrorism’. The messianic zeal with which Israel rushed to conquer and colonise the West Bank soon troubled Jewish liberals like Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jean Daniel, the editor of the Nouvel Observateur, but Lanzmann’s attachment to Israel only grew fiercer. After the Six-Day War, Lanzmann returned to Israel. He spent time with troops on the ...”

“... it is announced that the president is planning to disband the Corona Task Force, whose doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx have been prominent in daily briefings. According to Vice President Mike Pence, ‘it really is all a reflection of the tremendous progress we’ve made as a country.’ He does not say that it is a reflection of the task force’s ...”

“... in the Welsh hills. When the river makes trouble for Tewkesbury, it begins there, far to the north-west, with downpours that take days to swell the Severn downstream. There’s time to act, and usually there’s no need; the river bloats out into the meadows of the floodplain for a few days, one or other of the usual handful of houses gets flooded, and the ...”

“... the left and the right. It isn’t by accident that Jed Bartlet – the fictional president in The West Wing, the TV fantasy that sustained liberal America during the dark Bush years – was a genial economics professor and Nobel laureate. It was a fantasy. The synthesis of brains, wisdom and power embodied in Bartlet didn’t stand up to 21st-century ...”

“... can draw inspiration? François Mitterrand was born in 1916 in Jarnac in the Charente, in south-west France. He was the son of a stationmaster, and the grandson of a vinegar maker in the Cognac region. He was raised in a well-off and well-educated Catholic family; they were staunch traditionalists, but not followers of the extremist, anti-Semitic Action ...”

“... for instance, though nothing quite so unexpected as a presentation copy of some art book signed by Anthony Blunt that turned up round the corner in Age Concern.15 September. Much missed these shameful days is Tom Bingham, the ex-lord chief justice and legal philosopher, who would have had Johnson scuttling for cover. Both from Balliol, one a credit to the ...”

“... various ways. For those with the deepest professional investment in the discipline as it existed, Anthony Giddens, for example, the task was to work even harder at establishing sociology as the primary explainer and navigational aid of modern societies. Elsewhere, a kind of postmodern sociology emerged, inspired by French theory, which was suspicious of ...”

“... misunderstanding – the tragedy of incomprehension which has brought Japan to war against the West. The personal element of the tragedy comes not just from the feeling of his own life being wasted (and anyway, much of the poem seems to have been written after the internment was over) but from regret for the years that were wasted before, when diplomacy ...”