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“... But then we’d have no proof of who he was,’ the retired official said. ‘We could see some guy is walking around at night, but we have no intercepts because there’s no commo coming from the compound.’ In October, Obama was briefed on the intelligence. His response was cautious, the retired official said. ‘It just made no sense that bin Laden was ...”

“... easy for a president to go to war,” he said. “That quote from me in 2007 – I agree with that guy. That’s who I am.”’ Rhodes finds it impossible to argue with this sentiment, but he also finds it difficult to sacrifice his urge to do better than last time. ‘It was as if Obama was finally forcing me to let go of a part of who I was – the person ...”

“... of ‘Good old Toyners’: later he was fined a pound by the Party. The Cambridge of John Cornford would have regarded such frivolity as monstrous.) He was consistently irresponsible and enjoyed, rather than feared, the thunderbolts that followed. In Brussels in 1945 he used to dress up as a padre in battle-dress and dog-collar: but Miss Mitford ...”

“... of unintended promotion takes a subtler form in the case of Amis’s fictional counter-hero, John Self, the money-glutton and pornographer, a man with as much interior culture as a massage parlour. The author describes this crass compendium of gross appetites so brilliantly, and with such inventive wit, that the character comes to seem perversely deep ...”

“... acquired a patina of critical respectability, rather as if Sid James, with time, had turned into John Gielgud. It’s worth saying that whatever the excesses and incoherencies of Coppola’s Dracula, it is the work of an inventive and subtle movie imagination, which the Hammer films were not. Of course, we could disavow Gary Oldman if he weren’t so ...”

“... Meanwhile, plenty of other countries might also have been classed as ‘pandemoniums’, to use John Milton’s newly minted word. France endured regicide and rebellion and the Holy Roman Empire lost perhaps five million lives to the Thirty Years’ War. Nothing in England was comparable to the sack of Magdeburg in 1631. Jackson anticipates and deflects ...”

“... turned up in 1974, and kept Christopher both amused and busy translating his poetry into English. John Silber, who later became a reactionary megalomaniac (first as president of Boston University and then as failed gubernatorial candidate), was at that point a brilliant and progressive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also brought in by Ransom. The ...”

“... often indulged friends or relatives. (Play It as It Lays was scripted by Dominick’s brother, John Gregory Dunne, and his wife, Joan Didion, and was an adaptation of Didion’s warning novel on Hollywood.) But he threw parties, and for a few years real class people came, and he took their pictures. He hadn’t set out to be a studied photographer, but he ...”

“... physically identical but morally distinct men swap lives. Not only does the unattached but lonely John find himself forced into the complex identity of his alter ego, Count Jean de Gué, but his physical resemblance to de Gué’s mother and daughter bestows a past and a future on him, drawing him into the human chain. Taken to extremes, such permeability ...”

“... of mise en scène and all-round plausibility, The Emperor of Ocean Park lies somewhere south of John Grisham and north of Nancy Drew. It is long-winded, shoddily put together and riddled with repetitions and small inconsistencies: characters are introduced twice, facts stated and restated as if for the first time; a pool table appears mid-scene (as if from ...”

“... bottles with petrol, paraffin and tar and finishing them off with two of Messrs Brock’s gay blue Guy Fawkes squibs bound tightly to the sides . . . This novel form of bottle party is conducted with the usual supply of English chaff and good humour.’ Eclipsing these patriotic exercises at Sissinghurst were the Home Guard demonstrations at Osterley ...”

“... sources and give them life within her fiction is quite exceptional. The Protestant martyrologist John Foxe relates in sketchy detail, with much acknowledgment that his sources are imperfect, the burning of the Lollard Joan Boughton at Smithfield in 1494. ‘The night following that she was burnt,’ Foxe says, ‘the most part of her ashes were had away of ...”

“... 1925; the family moved to Los Angeles and young Dalton – neighbours remembered a ‘busy-assed guy, wound up like an eight-day clock … always noisy and talkative’ – was pulled out of college to support his family. For eight years he worked nights at the Davis Perfection Bakery, bootlegging and kiting cheques: a ‘period of horror’. His writing ...”

“... and distinctive achievement. Pinget has been reasonably well served by his English publisher, John Calder, over the years, despite the solecism of choosing the title Recurrent Melody for the almost self-explanatory Passacaille (published in French in 1969 and translated in 1975). In the recent past, however, the pace of Pinget translations seems to have ...”

“... Montaigne. To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever ...”