“... in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. Khachaturian isn’t let off the hook either: ‘He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with ...”

“... the notes into the till. On other occasions the reporter flew first-class with his wife to New York for a New Year party and spent £10,000 in one day on furnishings. He spent £140,000 on restoring a yacht. He rented a gallery in central Hamburg as his personal museum. At one time or another he had been trusted with most of the £2,500,000 in bank notes ...”

“... until they were discredited in 1964, after massive crop failures). During the Sixties, in New York City, twins put up for adoption were separated and used for psychological studies under the direction of Peter Neubauer, who never told either them or their parents that they were twins, or that they were being studied. In ...”

“... on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people’. If Khamenei were to ...”

“... man in diapers!’). After a long absence he returns from his country retreat to New York, where he meets an old friend, Amy Bellette, mistress of the deceased novelist E.I. Lonoff. Amy has a brain tumour and is being pestered by a young man who wants to write Lonoff’s biography. He must be prevented, for biography is regarded as ‘a second ...”

“... law and medicine. Prominent Lebanese Americans like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony Shadid was an exception. As ...”

“... to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking possibilities as much as seeking answers, and some of these possibilities are fascinating, whatever our scepticism may be about the larger ...”

“... On 18 October​ 2010 my father, Peter Campbell, was diagnosed with the cancer of which he would die exactly one year and one week later. I do not know precisely how he lived with the knowledge of his approaching death, what denials he practised or accommodations he reached, because he chose – once the oncologist at the Royal Marsden had handed down the death sentence – to live as much as possible as he had before ...”

“... early years, al-Jazeera was warmly welcomed in Washington and Jerusalem. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, celebrated the birth of the station with a bucketful of praise: it marked, he said, the dawn of Arab freedom. Ehud Ya’ari was similarly praising two years ago in the Jerusalem Report: ‘Out of a modest, low-rise prefab, five ...”

“... would have affected most people. At the same time, though Cambridge may once have plotted against York, and held troops in readiness outside Southampton, this sort of political intrigue is described as one might report today on a group of self-interested businessmen seeking to further their own fortunes by a little shady dealing. There is no hint of the ...”

“... He stopped playing professionally and went back to visual art for good. His first show in New York at the Durlacher Gallery was a critical success. Rachel Lambert ‘Bunny’ Mellon was impressed. She bought three pictures and gave two of them to her friend Jacqueline Kennedy to hang in the White House. McEwen later met Jackie and explained that the ...”

“... not doubt that Mr McGregor, had he been blessed with children, would have read them The Tale of Peter Rabbit; and it is not hard to imagine someone still smiling over the enchanting Mrs Tittlemouse as they set a mousetrap. Why should we find it surprising that an art-lover in 1790 or so, who wept at a picture of an undernourished, ragged child gathering ...”

“... rose to popular fame (and fortune) with his work on the gentle Mbuti and the abominable Ik, and Peter Brook added to his fame with the theatrical version of the latter (Les Iks, to be exact). Anthropologists were tolerant of The Forest People (1961) despite its naive romanticism, since it was an engaging account, which illustrated the role of the ...”

“... of virtuoso psychiatrist-bashing. (Both also provided the occasion for first-rate books: on Peter Sutcliffe, Gordon Burn’s Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son and Nicole Ward-Jouve’s The Street-Cleaner; on Dennis Nilsen, Brian Masters’s Killing for Company.) Before the 1981 trial of Peter Sutcliffe for the 13 ...”

“... Another recent biography of a leading modern artist was composed under similar restrictions. Peter Ackroyd says he was ‘forbidden by the Eliot estate to quote from Eliot’s published work, except for purposes of fair comment in a critical context, or to quote from Eliot’s unpublished work or correspondence’. As it happens, the two subjects, while ...”