“... before he had been provoked either by libel or ‘sustained vilification’. It started at David Frost’s house in July 1975 when Frost (who told the story to Peter Jay) introduced Goldsmith to Wilson and Falkender. Since both Goldsmith and Wilson had, at different times, declared that the Eye was dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and social ...”

“... is cruelty in it.’ At Oxford he made friends with two other able autobiographers, David Thomson, the future BBC producer, and Denis Hills, the African explorer, destined to be rescued by James Callaghan from the clutches of Idi Amin. Michael Wharton spent much of his term-time practising West Riding Knife Throwing with his mates, or drinking ...”

“... sugar and slaves – from whom is descended one of the National Theatre’s noted actors, David Harewood. When I first showed People to the director Nicholas Hytner he remarked that it wasn’t like anything else I’d done – or anything else I’d done with him. The play, though, that does have hints of it is Getting On (1971), which, like ...”

“... and there is even a computer game in which you can play at bashing the British at Canton. Wasn’t David Cameron aware of all this when he arrived in Beijing in November 2010 wearing a Remembrance Day poppy in his buttonhole? Or the right-wing press, when it heaped praise on him for allegedly refusing to remove it when the ...”

“... to the Jews’ second-class citizenship, drew a line at a certain level of ill-treatment. When the wearing of the Star of David was made compulsory in 1941 the US embassy reported ‘almost universal disapproval by the people of Berlin and in some cases ... astonishing manifestations of sympathy with the Jews in ...”

“... Dillon, and rushed back to Kennedy, who gave Dillon the job. Graham also recommended his friend David Bruce for Secretary of State, advice the President-elect didn’t take, choosing Dean Rusk instead. At Graham’s suggestion, Bruce became Ambassador in London, and before very long Graham was badgering Kennedy to sack Rusk and give the job to Bruce. Philip ...”

“... moustache and stood in the driveway without a shirt.’ A ‘straitlaced and stern’ lawyer is wearing ‘the kind of big class ring I sometimes imagine opening a cut beneath my eye’. If the book has a weakness, it’s that it tends towards fragmentation. Cohen has a hard time keeping up any narrative momentum. This may be complicated, fragmentary ...”

“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

“... the examples our lawmakers bear in mind when they frame a policy of response in the days to come. David Bromwich New Haven The news from the Middle East is not all bad. The savagery of the attacks on 11 September has, in at least one country, brought Muslim militancy into disrepute and swelled the ranks of the moderates. At the main public prayers in Tehran ...”

“... to have been foreseen from the time of my birth, for they gave me a couple of good Jewish names, David and Bernard, but preceded them with Anthony. I was always called Tony. This perhaps went well with the sort of role my mother wanted me to play. When I was eight she said she would like me to have a career like Noël Coward’s; later she suggested that I ...”

“... many of those involved hung out at the Chat Noir. Satie fell in with Joséphin Péladan, a cape-wearing Kabbalist from Lyon with a forked beard and hair like an electrified bird’s nest. He was the ‘Imperator’ and ‘Sâr’ (a title he claimed was bestowed on his family by a Babylonian king) of a Rosicrucian order called the Rose + Croix ...”

“... and any number of ministers and favourites. In Mary Rose, his book about Brandon’s third wife, David Loades says: ‘He was present everywhere, but it is hard to pinpoint what he actually did.’ Throughout his career Charles accumulated grand-sounding titles, which confused outsiders into overestimating his importance as a policymaker. When he became ...”

“... was always ready to be flipped, hoisted or clipped onto aerial wires – hands-free, of course, wearing the signature ‘Britney mic’.The perfect pop star, then, though not especially interested in music. When she was paired with au courant collaborators – Southern hip-hop minimalists the Neptunes, the Swedish super-producers Max Martin and Bloodshy ...”

“... too much John Hoyer Updike. In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has ...”

“... the British army and defend the Soviet Union. In the December 1942 wedding photograph my father is wearing a cheeky smile and a British army uniform. He fought, like a number of British communists, at Monte Cassino. My mother, whose father was the prime minister of the Punjab, impulsively donated most of her wedding jewellery to the CPI. Before all that she ...”