“... a decent public school and one of the older Oxbridge colleges tend to instil in a chap. Anyway, as Peter Conrad reasonably suggested in reply, you could just as well characterise academics by their neurotic maladjustment and social dysfunction as by their braying voices and lofty disregard for the human reality of the head porter.The awful dons in that essay ...”

“... putting huge strains on social insurance funds and local government. Schröder’s staff, led by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, later foreign minister and now president of Germany, worked with think tanks such as the Bertelsmann Stiftung, and labour experts such as Peter Hartz (the later disgraced HR boss of VW), to devise a new ...”

“... it through his own little group. Noll’s achievement is flawed, but it deserves comparison with Frank Sulloway’s Freud, Biologist of the Mind. Sulloway retrieved an important, but almost entirely neglected dimension of Freud’s thought; Noll has done the same for Jung. How close, then, are we finally to bringing Jung to the judgment of history? A ...”

“... Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor’s Cobra II, George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate, Peter Galbraith’s The End of Iraq, and now Woodward: these books and many others present their versions of what went wrong, aim for a culprit, and hope that a firing or a resignation will reverse the situation. But they don’t consider a question they ...”

“... succeeded him, Ken Livingstone. ‘A gimmick’. A megalomaniac right-wing fantasy. By 2008, in a frank admission during the run-up to the mayoral election, Livingstone boasted that he had feigned enthusiasm for the 2012 Olympics as a way of generating funds for brownfield development in East London and Thames Gateway, seeding his favoured pylon-forest ...”

“... had installed itself in the KPD headquarters, now conveniently vacant. Liddell was assisted by Frank Foley, MI6’s Berlin station chief, whose diplomatic cover was passport control officer. On 31 March, the two men entered Karl Liebknecht Haus, now renamed Horst Wessel Haus and sporting a huge swastika where only weeks earlier Lenin had stared out from a ...”

“... is unfavourably impressed with her high-pitched voice. Sontag visits Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky in their hotel on rue Gît-le-Coeur; years later she will berate herself for namedropping the connection (‘how many times did I talk about Allen Ginsberg last year?’). Sontag goes to her first Paris party, at the home of the philosopher Jean ...”

“... in 1945, ‘to end the war in plain clothes writing. I remember at the start of it writing to Frank Pakenham that its value to us would be to show us finally that we are not men of action. I took longer than him to learn it.’ Was this what led him to romanticise failure – the failure of Charles Ryder to get religion or to get Julia, the failure of Guy ...”

“... non-apology, every linguistic squirm took its toll. Byers enjoyed more premature obituaries than Frank Sinatra; so that his demise, when it came, was barely noticed. Stephen who? Was he the Dome conceptualist who jumped ship? Or the official embodiment of bad news? Status revoked, limo withdrawn, the wretched man was exposed to the ultimate humiliation: a ...”

“... any objection to seeing a Pakistani analyst. As I left he said, very kindly, ‘You have been very frank with me,’ adding: ‘I think you were a lonely child.’I arranged an appointment with Masud Khan from my office in the Treasury, where I was now an economic adviser, and he met me at the foot of the stairs leading to his attic apartment in Harley ...”

“... he wrote up in Remote People, one of several good travel books of this period. (Indeed, along with Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure, Waugh has some claim to have invented the modern travel book.) He took to Addis Ababa during the celebrations, its ‘tangle of modernism and barbarity’ giving it a ‘crazy enchantment’ that he likened to Alice in ...”

“... a Christian after all) but that of the rest of the cast. 7 April. The open mouth of Chelsea’s Frank Lampard, having scored a goal, is also the howl on the face of the damned man in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. 16 April. The row over Lord Ashcroft’s non-dom status seems to have died down. Nobody, I think, noted that it was the reverse of the row that ...”

“... and compulsory purchase legislation is archaic and complex,’ says a leaflet produced by Knight Frank, the property consultancy on the scheme. Unfathomable would be a better way of putting it. In France, the state buys homes at full market price in a band of 150 metres on either side of land affected by a scheme of national importance, but in the UK only ...”

“... Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book, in which the journalists Peter Finn and Petra Couvée pick through a cache of documents, released to them by the CIA, that confirms the long extant rumour of the agency’s role in publishing the text in Russian.2 This rumour had already been investigated (it took him twenty years) by ...”

“... also Albert Camus’s ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’: A Text and it Contexts by Neil Foxlee (Peter Lang, 2010) and We are no longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria by Allison Drew (Manchester, 2014).  Conor Cruise O’Brien’s critique of Camus was the first title in the Fontana Modern Masters series, edited by ...”