“... replied: ‘Tell me one of them for I will not believe you.’ ‘I have fucked Kent’s wife, the miller, to fritters.’ Ungrateful to a Victorian ear, perhaps, and not entirely acceptable even today, but typical of its time and of the publicity which might surround such goings-on. The same quality inevitably attaches to the prose of the incomparably more ...”

“... incandescent ardour, that Arendt approached the conundrums of philosophy and modern politics. As Richard Bernstein has remarked, she believed that thinking could be taught, if at all, only ‘by infecting others with those perplexities that occasion all authentic thinking’. That is why her work, however frustrating, still merits ...”

“... primarily on a trove of data assembled by a ‘control-freak’ landlord (Hindle’s phrase), Sir Richard Newdigate, 2nd baronet, an ancestor of the landowner for whom Eliot’s father acted as agent. Provoked by a sense of rivalry with neighbouring landowners, Newdigate sent elected officials (called ‘jurors’) knocking on every door in the parish to ...”

“... doing well’. Birt agreed, with consequences for the BBC as a whole. But it is also clear from Richard Lindley’s long, densely researched history of Panorama that the programme’s perceived importance over the past fifty years has been generated as much by its own staff, with their professional egos and particular working practices, as by outside ...”

“... a piece about a murder in the San Bernadino Valley – Mormon country. On 7 October 1964, Lucille Miller took her depressive and generally below-par husband, Cork, out for a moonlight drive in their Volkswagen. After a visit to a nearby supermarket, Mrs Miller stopped the car in the middle of the road, poured a can of ...”

“... it might have been because he began by showing no interest in her; he had gone to interview Arthur Miller just before filming started on The Misfits, which would be Monroe’s last finished film. ‘I’ve seen you talk,’ he reports her saying, ‘to everyone but me.’ In fact he couldn’t forgive her for having turned ...”

“... The earlier plays of David Mamet seemed to spring from a meeting between Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, as if the characters from The Caretaker or The Homecoming had caught the American anxieties of Death of a Salesman. Pinter is also never far from the later plays, and he directed Oleanna in London; but other, more oblique influences now hover in the air ...”

“... to pretend they were moderates, and to give the biggest speaking slots to Republicans (and Zell Miller, a Democrat) who hold views quite opposite to those of George W. Bush on most matters to do with social policy, but not on matters to do with 11 September and the War on Terror. So we had the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani presenting himself as a ...”

“... Freud. But it is also because a past is not a thing to be discovered. As the analyst said, and as Richard Rorty has been saying in this journal, it is not discovered but made. Ronald Fraser was not trying to determine, like certain historians of former times, what his past ‘really was’. But there is some question of a pathogenic secret, of the recovery of ...”

“... is always the possibility that all the swooping and posing was shriekingly funny to watch, but Richard Murdoch, who was up in 1936 and much later made a solid contribution to the British humorous tradition with Much Binding in the Marsh, looked back on his Footlights days with a nostalgia well tempered by a sense of proportion. He said that they weren’t ...”

“... Imagine a mixture of Maurice Chevalier (Gallic charm), Max Miller (the Cheeky Chappie), and Don Juan, with a boastful list of sexual conquests on which contesse, baronesse, marchesine, principesse line up with famous literary and theatrical ladies as well as top professionals in another field. The man is also a racing driver, yachtsman, avant-garde theatre and film producer, poet, translator of Elizabethan verse and Christopher Fry, and the inventor of the windscreen-wiper, starlight electric bulbs and château bottling, not to speak of his being a Rothschild ...”

“... Taverner’, thus seems to have kept a pub in Ipswich, while his great-great-grandson, Richard Duke of Suffolk, nicknamed ‘Blanche Rose’, was accepted as King of England – but, alas, only by the French, and only till he was killed in battle at Pavia. There is an irony, on which Derek Pearsall ends his book, in the extirpation of the Chaucer ...”

“... elegantly demonstrates how ‘the idea of the poet’ framed literary lives from Keats onwards. Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates (1983) does the same for the English Renaissance. The title of The Great Pretender is triple-loaded: the hero Ben Janis is a claimant for poetic fame, a laureate hoping to crown himself. His claims, he suspects with ...”

“... compared the action to that of an animal in his zoos. The Christian editor of Private Eye, Richard Ingrams, who has lately, after a lifetime spent in the publication of sneers and lies, gone to his reward in the shape of a column in the country’s most snobbish newspaper, came out with a piece headed ‘All’s well that ends Elwes.’ Masters is ...”

“... of Parisian intellectuals: a Maoist psychoanalyst with a PhD, modelled on Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan’s son-in-law; and a socialist politician who goes by the initials BFD. They condescend to the narrator, whom they see as a ‘noble savage’, rehearse Western leftist clichés and buy his drugs. On a trip to the brothel, BFD gives off ‘an air ...”