“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shepherd boys’ and ‘honey-sweet sheep bells’ (‘Once in Arcady’), even, in ‘A Rune for Anthony John’, ‘Poecil carpets’. In ‘Sanctuary’, the narrator commands of the flowers, ‘Lie so. Be beautiful’, and they lie so even throughout Day Lewis’s next collection, Country Comets (1928), which is filled with ever more intimations of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... these basic mythemes into their own forms of ‘poetic space’ or ‘heroic memory’, as Anthony Smith terms them in his fundamental study of The Ethnic Origins of Nations. In a moving passage, Braudel confessed his passion for France, but promised to put it aside in his book. He characteristically added: ‘It is possible that it will play tricks on ...”

“... Willesden Green Station on the Metropolitan Line. This was one of several neighbourhoods in North-West London to which prospering Jews tended to migrate from East London in the 1920s and 1930s, the most notorious being Golders Green, otherwise known as Goldberg Green or the Polish Corridor. We were to live in Teignmouth Road till 1940, so it is inevitable ...”