“... zeal. Harold Evans had taken over as Editor the previous year. Francis Wyndham and I later became close friends but at first he seemed formidable, even a little intimidating. He was already a legend among his contemporaries for his intellectual prowess, which seemed far too great for his job – he was loosely described as ‘Show-Business Editor’. He had ...”

“... Shore displays the greatest awareness of such an approach when he writes what is a remarkably frank eulogy of both Labour and Conservative governments after 1945. Gerald Kaufman, who, incidentally, is going to restore Rutland and the Soke of Peterborough, is also alive to the openings offered by high-handed Tory reform in local government and the ...”

“... campaign and to whip up opposition, being prepared to enter on the task of her rehabilitation. Frank Moraes had produced a dutifully respectful biography of her father: why should not his son do the same for her? In 1970, he had written flatteringly in the New York Times Sunday Magazine: there is no adequate replacement for Mrs Gandhi as Prime Minister of ...”

“... and artistic milieu, where he frequented literary salons and met men like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Frank Wedekind and Stefan Zweig. He had become well known by 1914, publishing two volumes of essays on subjects ranging from economics to morality. In his essays on art he rejected what he saw as the modernism of the French Impressionists and advocated the ...”

“... less-is-more style of acting as ‘a fundamental understanding of what the minute scrutiny of that close camera and the magnification of that big screen could do’. Like many male screen icons of his generation, Mitchum was uneasy with what he did. ‘Acting is a ridiculous and humiliating profession,’ he told interviewers, and called himself a ‘movie ...”

“... first’. Lee, sitting a few rows from the front, was nodding along furiously.Farage was due to close the first day, but around noon a booming tannoy announced that his speech was being moved forward. With Westminster in tumult over Angela Rayner’s resignation as deputy prime minister, he wanted to make sure he hit the lunchtime news. I hurried to the ...”

“... raised a question that wouldn’t go away for Auden: the importance, or the impotence, of being frank. Discussing Peer Gynt in The Dyer’s Hand, he wrote that ‘both the dreamer and the madman are in earnest; neither is capable of play-acting.’ The dreamer is ‘like the movie-goer who writes abusive letters to the actor he has seen playing a ...”

“... of the name possessing a vague penumbra of associative hints and suggestions (‘Francis’ = ‘frank’, ‘French’; ‘Ponge’ = ‘sponge’, ‘spongiosity’ etc). More revealing, Derrida argues, is the effect of these names taken together, treated as a compound signifying term. In the play of sense opened up by this chance conjunction of names we ...”

“... agreement between Russia and Germany to build a $5 billion pipeline. In Ireland, as documented by Frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan in their recent bestseller about property developers,* the building industry and Fianna Fáil have spent decades in a mutually beneficial partnership. Highly favourable tax deals benefited developers in the boom years, and at the ...”

“... and youngest first and then many of the rest. In October 1960, at last, Mao Zedong was handed a frank report on mass starvation in Xinyang, and within a month investigative teams fanned out to the provinces to document the death toll. By the beginning of 1961, the policies of the Great Leap Forward had been rolled back and grain was being imported from the ...”

“... Apart from help from Spender’s family and friends, we are told that the typescript was read by Frank Kermode, Stuart Hampshire, Richard Wollheim and Karl Miller, a formidable jury who, at the very least, seem likely to have ensured that a satisfactory account of the Encounter imbroglio would be given. Faced with such difficulties and such good ...”

“... to Gelpi, plumbs great depths. Despite its uniquely complicated motives and its unusually frank statements of intent, living in Time is in fact the logical outcome of Gelpi’s methods and beliefs, already demonstrated and outlined in his two important books on the American poetic tradition, The Tenth Muse (1975) and A Coherent Splendour (1987). In ...”

“... placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of the TUC has in it some wonderfully revealing passages on these (and other) periods: none so rich as the gathering of 1 June 1969 at Chequers which brought together Wilson, his First (and Employment) Secretary Barbara Castle, Jack Jones of the ...”

“... was naturally postponed to the end of the war. Hoberman places the German surrender at Stalingrad close to the release of Song of Russia, a movie about the invasion as experienced by ordinary Russians. Again, there was nothing peculiar then about such a treatment and such a title. Robert Rossen, the most gifted member of the far left milieu, was advised about ...”

“... artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns as well as the 23-year-old Frank Stella, the enfant terrible of geometric abstraction. Colour-field painters like Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, whose work Newman had influenced but didn’t encourage, were also on the rise, and Greenberg had swung much of his support to ...”