“... courtiers after his empire had been overthrown) now that it seems unlikely that those interviews took place as he described them? To Domosławski, as a young Polish journalist writing after a decade of horrifying slander, of barrages about who did what in the Communist past, Kapuściński’s politics matter more. As a teenager growing up in a country ...”

“... all of which ended in failure. First, there was the Flint Voice, a local alternative rag which took on such subjects as police brutality and the looming presence of General Motors. In 1983, this morphed into the Michigan Voice, where Moore met his wife, Kathleen Glynn, who has produced all his films. Next came his disastrous editorship of Mother Jones, the ...”

“... abandoned hotels and nightclubs, deserted runways and flooded rivers.’ After the war, Ballard took a boat to Southampton with his mother and younger sister. In 1947, Edna and Margaret rejoined Ballard’s father in Shanghai, while he remained in England, boarding at The Leys School in Cambridge and spending the holidays with his maternal grandparents in ...”

“... and writers and tourists of the Civil War, Gellhorn and Hemingway began sleeping together; she took his condescension and misogyny for ‘the foibles of genius’. Madrid under Fascist shelling seems to have been one long party for foreign correspondents. ‘The Fascists had the better gramophone and played a song called "Kitten on the Keys” again and ...”

“... not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil. The author of this passage was John Maynard Keynes. His words were not carelessly uttered but form the pregnant last paragraph of his magnum opus, The General Theory, published in 1936. This obviously expressed his hope that his own ideas would be disseminated through such a process and in ...”

“... America, Moody’s major-statement novel about the nuclear family in the age of nuclear jitters, took this approach about as far as it could go. As its cover suggests, The Black Veil finds Moody reaching past his immediate literary fathers to his anguished forefathers, Hawthorne, Melville and Poe – the first example of American genius as damaged ...”

“... boat. This time, however, it was not the thought of pretty girls that diverted him but his friend John Evelyn’s ‘pretty’ new book ‘against Solitude’. Evelyn’s Publick employment and an active life prefer’d to solitude, published in 1667, was written to refute Sir George Mackenzie’s 1665 work, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Public ...”

“... Hearing the news on the Today programme this morning R. nearly cries. I met Bowie only once, at John Schlesinger’s sometime in the 1980s, and remember him as a slight, almost colourless figure, who was somehow Scots. M. calls later and recalls how someone he knew picked up Bowie when he was still David Jones. He offered to come round, bringing his guitar ...”

“... who, having served a prison sentence for armed robbery, decided his fighting days were over and took a job in the Sinn Féin press office. O’Rawe still believed that the political campaign was a way of winning broader support for the IRA’s military effort. But looking back he believes that, all the while, Adams was intent on the political struggle ...”

“... noble art of fostering conversation across doctrinal divides. But that isn’t the route MacIntyre took. For him, liberalism is no more than a front for capitalist individualism, seeking to reduce the complexities of human existence to a grim tug of war between ‘arbitrary choices of individuals’ and ‘collectivist control’. Meanwhile democracy ...”

“... expected to be strictly apolitical; the independence of the judiciary is considered sacrosanct. John Rawls went to extraordinary lengths to imagine an ‘original position’ in which everyone would be capable of agreeing on the principles of social justice: in it, each of us would be ignorant of our own social status and effectively function as an outside ...”

“... by churning out more than a hundred romanzi rosa under the pseudonym ‘Josie Bell’, Meloni took on jobs from babysitting to working behind the bar at the Rome nightclub Piper. She studied languages at a tourism school, setting her up for her assured appearances on the international stage: perfect, impassioned Spanish when giving a speech against LGBTQ ...”

“... of the despised ‘intelligentsia’. Being unillusioned was his speciality, and in public he took a nicely self-deprecating line. ‘There are but two important critics in my own country who have troubled to take me seriously,’ he writes in The Summing Up (1938), ‘and when clever young men write essays about contemporary fiction they never think of ...”

“... is the century: ‘I am one hundred years old. I can read. I went to the mission school.’ She took care of the bear before Lou came and she’ll take care of him again when Lou is gone. Shit with the bear every morning and he’ll like you, Lucy says. And Lou thinks, why not? Set two smells next to each other like twin beds. Now, if my happiness came down ...”

“... libel damages at an acceptable level restarted the meter too high. A jury had given Elton John £350,000 damages against the Sunday Mirror for an untrue story which claimed he was chronically bulimic and was on a bizarre diet that involved chewing food and spitting it out. Of the damages, £75,000 was to compensate him for the harm to his ...”