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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are successful abroad is that they shall give a leg up to their fellow-countrymen. A few do so; Peter Porter has been most generous, and Clive James has come to the task more recently, but also with generosity. In this vivacious and often sumptuous new collection of his essays, he has a great deal to say in praise of fellow expatriates, and some magnanimous ...”

“... on the belief that the word ‘history’ stood for ‘hiss-Tory’, but the recent work of Peter Clarke, for example, has shown how much these difficulties were part of the central experience of a generation. The other great refuge of liberal optimism, in 1914 as in 1867, was education. It is hard to read Russell On Education without seeing that the ...”

“... Even inferior tradesmen had to be kept at bay. The Great Fire of London – the point at which Peter Thorold’s book begins – led to an outflow of the dingier homeless from the City westward. Some were absorbed in rookeries and Alsatias, packed with thieves and noseless beggars, or in the sizable slum which adjoined Whitehall. There was no welcome for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... labour – also legal in character – and goes with mysterious politeness to a death in the New York Tombs: an enigmatic martyr, he seems to suffer from some perception which makes intolerable to him his probably emblematic task of copying. Nicholas Salaman’s heroine Charlet, ‘falling apart’ in his new novel, has more to do with up-to-the-minute ...”

“... an ogre to Zionists to this day. It was so slipshod and inaccurate that Thurston Clarke in the New York Times thought the most charitable speculation was that it had been ‘dictated but never read, neither by the former prime minister nor by his publishers’. After​ the brief and futile interlude of James Callaghan’s premiership, a new Tory prime ...”

“... than three million copies and was translated into a dozen languages. George ran for mayor of New York and finished ahead of Teddy Roosevelt, though behind the Tammany Hall candidate. Henry George Foundations still exist in London, Melbourne and his native Philadelphia. Liberal Democrats in Britain continue to hanker after George’s single land tax to ...”

“... him in America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which is more pungently caught in the oral biography Peter Manso produced in 1985, yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it ...”

“... family would assemble for decades, and the year after a mansion in Bronxville (just north of New York City) where, he believed, they could escape Brahmin prejudice for good. In 1925, Kennedy dived into the movie business, cranking out low-budget ‘programme pictures’, tightening up costs and cultivating relations with the trade press. He successfully ...”

“... major museums and galleries; dealers sprang up to capitalise on the new popular interest. The New York Outsider Art Fair was established in 1993, and grows bigger every year.* Among the first of these discoveries – and still perhaps my favourite outsider figure – was A.G. Rizzoli (1896-1981), a shy San Francisco architectural draughtsman, who lived with ...”

“... aliens. (Nor is this particular combination confined to Los Angeles, as is illustrated by Peter Brimelow’s borrowing of the title of the 1988 science fiction film, Alien Nation, for the anti-immigrant tract he published seven years later.) Congresswoman Seastrand invokes Sodom and Gomorrah because ‘we probably have the most adulterers living here ...”