“... by journalists heaving with indignation at secret service inefficiency and treachery. Nigel West’s book on MI6 looks by comparison, like an exercise in name-dropping. Not that Mr Andrew does not have his throw-away lines. Sir Claude Dansey, that unattractive deputy head of MI6, was, it appears, seduced at the age of 16 by Robbie Ross. Tom Driberg was ...”

“... Mills, Pine and Gilmore, Thomas Frank), and even a few socio-economic ones (Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens). The point is, however, not necessarily to endorse these (many are standard culture critiques), but rather to indicate the direction in which literary theory opens onto other disciplines. Class analysis is meanwhile omnipresent, and plagued as ...”

“... familiar environment. It is almost impossible to imagine what it would be like to work in the West Wing these days, given how far removed it currently is from anything that went on there before. Yet anyone who has ever worked with a narcissistic boss drunk on his or her own power will recognise it at once. The pettiness of Trumpworld is like the pettiness ...”

“... plague. For months, the Protector’s propaganda sheets pumped out tales of a great triumph in the West Indies. The ship that finally brought news of the grim toll was kept offshore in quarantine, not for fear of disease but rather to stop the news getting out. (This was by no means a unique early example of fake news. Elizabeth I squashed the news of the ...”

“... volume of new poetry ever again’, and didn’t publish another book of verse for twenty years. Anthony Quinton once gave a sniffy account of Spender’s interesting book about T.S. Eliot, and Spender was mortified, as though caught out doing something he had no right to attempt: Quinton’s piece was ‘of the kind I always bring down on myself and which ...”

“... about having lied to American officials for two years about Pakistan’s aid to the Taliban, and Anthony Lake, the US national security adviser from 1993 to 1997, who lets it be known that he thought the CIA director James Woolsey was ‘arrogant, tin-eared and brittle’. Woolsey was so disliked by Clinton that when an apparent suicide pilot crashed a ...”

“... Fascist grimace beneath the festive veneer’. After the war he became suspect in the USA and in West Germany, because he refused to attack East Germany, and because his old-fashioned democratic principles made him look like a Communist. He finally found the political air of 1950s America unbreathable. ‘I am unspeakably tired of this country,’ he ...”

“... and it was getting almost unwearable. Hoping to be able to use it in their current production the West Yorkshire Playhouse wrote to the NT to see if they could borrow it, only to find it had been disposed of. This was not due to shortage of space (the NT has a large warehouse for costumes) but because it was natural fur and therefore disapproved of. I’d ...”

“... of Never on Sunday and Psycho, in which, occupying a long floaty number, she prowls up to Anthony Perkins, perching beside him to croon. ‘What’s it about?’ he asks. ‘Like all Greek songs, about love and death,’ she replies. ‘I give you milk and honey and in return you give me poison.’ The museum was deserted. The entrance fee had ...”

“... contacts, supposed him a Tory. But in the strict sense, he never was. Over Suez in 1956, he called Anthony Eden a ‘vain, ineffectual Man of Blood’, and reviled ‘the world of lower-middle-class conservatives who have no intelligence but a deep belief in violence as a sign of self-importance’. He attended the first Congress for Cultural Freedom in ...”

“... brown. One ‘translation special pomenvylope’, passed on to me by the publisher and writer Anthony Rudolf, a frequent recipient, offers a witty version of a Greek epigram once attributed to Plato. The original was addressed to a boy called Aster (i.e. ‘star’); Moore’s version is date-stamped 26 January 1970, the year the Beatles broke up: You ...”

“... These areas have been hit hardest by the rise in the price of basic goods. In Douar Hicher, north-west of the city centre, I saw residents marching through the streets and burning tyres. In Mornag, another working-class neighbourhood, similar actions have been repressed with tear gas. When I travelled north through the city from Bab al-Khadra to Bab ...”

“... Big families​ are rare now in the West – even Catholic countries in Europe aren’t exactly prolific, though Ireland holds out against the trend – but even when they were commoner in life they didn’t loom large in fiction. Literature isn’t a branch of sociology, and drama favours a stage without too much human clutter ...”

“... rogue vents – from Eric von Stroheim in The Great Gabbo to Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night and Anthony Hopkins in Magic – who have been led astray by their dummy-selves; and real vents can be just as mixed up as fictional ones. When the English entertainer Arthur Prince died in 1948, his jolly partner Jim was interred with him, and they were joined in ...”

“... has always come out on top. If you picture him now, you might be visualising Charlton Heston in Anthony Mann’s epic of 1961, filmed in Franco’s Spain. For the climactic final scene, Mann restaged the most memorable story of the Castilian warlord, who conquered the Muslim city-state of Valencia and ruled over it for five years until his death in ...”