“... and, as much as possible for someone living in a small town, I tried to renounce what the King James Version calls the friendship of the world (James 4.4). I tried to be polite to my parents. I studied the Bible and read devotional books, inspirational books, books by a woman who’d saved Jews from the Nazis, Corrie ten ...”

“... into art – think of the lush bits of cited advertisements in paintings by Richard Hamilton or James Rosenquist – and the two-way traffic has continued ever since. Then, too, there is the notion of the artist as showman. Art-world impresarios existed before Surrealism – Marinetti qualifies, as does Tzara, not to mention, say, Courbet – but Dalí took ...”

“... down-home cousin hoodoo, the traditions of the ‘Mardi Gras Indians’, Professor Longhair and James Booker and Sam Cooke and Jelly Roll Morton and a hundred other croaking, squeaking, grunting voices of the bayou, levée and gulf. Animal voices and fish voices and spirit voices: a graveyard full of ghosts, old and young, all trying to make themselves ...”

“... James Angleton​ , chief of counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years, was not the ideal spy. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible ...”

“... with Elizabeth Taylor. But her place in the sun came with His Way: The Unauthorised Biography of Frank Sinatra, which raised Sinatra’s hoodlum status to the point where she was sued for two million dollars. Sinatra dropped the action, and Kelley’s book went to number one, but she was now singled out as an author who would reach for the very ceiling of ...”

“... Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty Boothroyd. Papers aren’t just papers any longer. A lot of these commentaries appeared online, some of them only ...”

“... missile soon after Trump’s inauguration. The need for a change of tack should be clear. James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, has admitted that Washington’s goal of pressing North Korea to give up its nuclear programme is ‘probably a lost cause’, and that ‘significant inducements’ will be required to deal with the ...”

“... cause of the reversal, the CIA was quick to claim credit for what the deputy CIA director Frank Wisner characterised as ‘a substantial victory for the West’. The US had saved Iran from the clutches of communism, and as far as it was concerned, it alone deserved the credit. The British had been helpful, but Iran was now an American show. The time ...”

“... became ex officio head of the Church of England. On any view this was going to be a problem, and James II as he now was, egged on by his theological advisers, made the worst of it. Among other unwise moves he declared the Test Acts, which barred Catholics and dissenters from public office, to be of no effect, allowing him to commission Catholics as army ...”

“... in 1974, Gunn met Ty’s ‘gorgeous big’ doorman, Allan Noseworthy. He was warm, generous, frank, fun, a voracious reader and a hopeless romantic. He wrote to Gunn of one guy: ‘I’ve found myself thinking about him 18 hrs a day (the six that I don’t are when I’m reading).’ Gunn found Noseworthyflighty, highly strung, at times silly, but so ...”

“... the book warns, ‘may kill us yet’. The distinction between fiction and myth is discussed by Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending. Roughly speaking, myths are fictions that have forgotten their own fictional status and taken themselves as real. Liberals like Brooks fear being imprisoned by their own convictions, or oppressed by the convictions of ...”

“... forbidden friend. Whereas Sophie von La Roche’s novel is one long rout of balls, formal games, frank exchanges of opinion, serious and less serious viewings of the heroine of the middle rank by the members of the aristocracy into which she fervently hopes to marry. Some of the difference of climate is also a difference of period: La Roche’s acknowledged ...”

“... with ‘I may be gone for some time.’ Roth’s titles have often teased with implied offers of frank confession: Reading Myself and Others. The Ghost Writer, ‘My True Story’, etc. In the preface to the last Peter Tarnopol solemnly announced that something truer than true was on its way: ‘Presently Mr Tarnopol is preparing to forsake fiction for a ...”

“... to it, and the energy of illusions. But How I Grew leaves us on the cold hillside. It is, to be frank, more than a little boring, like having tea with an elderly lady who holds you with her glittering eye while going on and on about her misspent youth. Boasting about it, in fact – but in a mumbling sort of way, dense with references to Maddies and Dotties ...”

“... consistency in its application to their own sons. When Trench turned down the advice of head boy James Mackay and flogged a couple of seniors for staying out late, Mackay told his father, the Earl of Inchcape. Rough treatment of the appropriately-named Viscount Brocas caused dismay in the household of his father, Earl Jellicoe. I recall the outraged ...”