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“... writers and artists, but the one that posterity will really value is her interview with ‘Sir James Savile’ for the IoS, on the occasion of his belated knighthood, 22 July 1990. ‘People were terribly shocked when I asked [him] if it was true that he liked little girls … Of course he denied it. But at least by posing the question I’d alerted ...”

“... for later. Tuesday 1 January: SpentRéveillon with Jean-Claude, Annick and friend. Clive James on BBC1 after midnight. Next day, Brasserie lunch in place du Châtelet. Taxi to Musée d’Orsay. Like many other furious people, found it closed because of bank holiday. Without warning, went to call on Méraud Guevara, rue de Lille behind the ...”

“... defence correspondent, Richard Norton-Taylor, sends me an email from London which he received from Simon Wren, an MoD press officer. Wren is ranting about my colleagues’ earlier reports on how soldiers haven’t got enough toilet paper, aren’t getting decent food and haven’t got the right colour of uniform. He’s put his mobile number at the bottom. I ...”

“... as the title for this collection of Confucius’ sayings by a 19th-century British translator, James Legge. The title is obscure, but it has stuck. Chichung Huang, in his literal translation, makes a strong case that the original title, Lun Yu, is best translated as Ethical Dialogues. Thinking of it in this way, as a book of ethics, presented mostly in the ...”

“... Renaissance London or Sixties Indonesia or an Internet discussion-group, in its performativity? Simon Goldhill, editor of an extremely diverse collection, conscientiously emphasises the ‘different levels and sites’ of Athenian performance, its ‘complexity and range’, ‘so much more dynamic than many of the cases that have been used in performance ...”

“... It belongs, in fact, in the category of Jack&Ian’s despised astrobiology. Unlike Jack&Ian, Simon Goodwin and John Gribbin are very keen on habitable zones, drawing two concentric spheres of habitability out from the Sun to mark the limits between which it might be worth looking for life. After reading Evolving the Alien this feels conservative, as well ...”

“... written in the late 1970s, Manning’s views are sometimes too explicit. When Harriet asks Simon what Britain has done for Egypt, he answers dutifully: ‘We’ve brought them justice and prosperity. We’ve shown them how people ought to live.’ Harriet, however, is ready with her own verdict: ‘What have we done here, except make money? I suppose a ...”

“... a companion drive a truck at great speed down a narrowing alley. The vehicle is too tall for the James Bond ruse of tilting it at an angle. It stays level and finally gets stuck between the walls. The two men leap out and climb onto two waiting motorcycles. It was all planned. This is where the mind comes back, of course, and we might think the attraction of ...”

“... survey the pagan context, for instance, are written as memoirs of two time-travellers, Martha and James, discovered by means of an advert in Time Out and launched by the professor into Pompeii, Tebtunis, Hierapolis and Ephesus, at great personal risk. The chapter on Christian apologia is written as a fictional correspondence about a fictional dinner-party ...”

“... private-enterprise medical practitioner, counsellor, sexual athlete and compulsive writer Simon Forman. Forman’s voluminous papers, case-notes, diaries and all sorts of other writings had been in the Bodleian Library since Elias Ashmole presented them in the late 17th century. They contained a vast amount of anecdote about all sorts of ...”

“... which Boltzmann inherited from his great forbears, the German Rudolf Clausius and the Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell, was entropy, a term designed to describe the apparently universal and irreversible tendency of heat to become less capable of doing useful work. Thus entropy measured disorder and the loss of accumulated resources, and reflected the strange ...”

“... I didn’t like to read ’em, particularly.’ Of his high-school contemporaries – who included James Baldwin, Paddy Chayefsky, Richard Avedon and Sugar Ray Robinson – the only one to make an impression on him was a classmate who used an easy flow of patter to sell his fellow students subscriptions to the New York Times.At seventeen he found a job at ...”

“... good and bad angels, the authoritative and the authoritarian. Linguistic conservatives like John Simon, who sometimes seem not only not to mind being disliked but to thrive on it, do not shrink from such acts of authority as will promptly be branded authoritarian – a word wielded in Sidney Greenbaum’s tour de task-force The English Language ...”

“... trip to the United States, where the big-game of major-league millionaires – Peter Widener, James G. Johnson, Samuel Kress – had leapt to profit from his publicised expertise. This was sometimes prompted by motives of undisguised envy and covetousness amongst themselves. On learning of BB’s descent on Widener’s optimistically attributed collection ...”

“... come from her discussions with Jérôme Lindon, the publisher of Robbe-Grillet, Butor and Claude Simon, from her studies of recent French literature or from her knowing Nathalie Sarraute. She realises that there is some common ground between her writing and that of the grande dame of French literature: ‘Je cherche sans doute quelque chose de l’ordre de ...”