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“... Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol (the future godfather of neoconservatism) and the cultural observer Robert Warshow, whose essays on the movie Western and gangster films would become anthology classics and whose personal mystique resembled James Agee’s without the all-night jags. When Warshow asks Podhoretz out to lunch, ‘I felt as a girl with a secret ...”

“... as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the Tube ...”

“... on 23 January looks suspiciously neat.’ Portray me, Canning may have been saying, and I who can frank your heavy-duty packages will arrange for your bail and have the charge lifted. If that was the bargain, Gillray repaid the debt with characteristic wit and economy. He made Canning wait nine months before casting him in Promis’d Horrors of the French ...”

“... in a city that doesn’t sleep and find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap.’ The lyrics of Frank Sinatra’s standard ring out like a mocking chorus from the Yankee Stadium when the hometown wins. Poor Trump, who thought the song should be his anthem, could never shake his ‘little town blues’. His humiliation at his failure ‘to make it ...”

“... later Sartre’s secretary, shared his anger at a student protest in support of the Fascist writer Robert Brasillach, on trial for collaboration. (That Brasillach had once been a student at Louis-le-Grand counted more with their classmates than his anti-semitism.) Lanzmann and Cau formed a groupuscule with the future novelists Michel Tournier and Michel ...”

“... who feed them. In Pity the Billionaire: The Unlikely Comeback of the American Right, Thomas Frank describes a similar process in America: ‘The conservative renaissance rewrites history according to the political demands of the moment, generates thick smokescreens of deliberate bewilderment, grabs for itself the nobility of the common toiler, and ...”

“... been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep). And she gave us handouts of Heinrich von Kleist’s inexhaustibly spiralling ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, photocopied from the TLS. I studied with Gillian for a year, we corresponded and met up sometimes in the 1990s, but I ...”

“... His advisers were people he had promoted. Generals who had expressed divergent opinions in ‘frank and informal get-togethers’ had been retired. His political allies were worried that their opportunities to enrich themselves even further would be curtailed if they had to share power with Benazir. What if the Supreme Court were now to declare his ...”

“... could be married and a film born.The back office deity of that era was the seven-times-married Robert Evans, who ran production at Paramount for a decade from 1966, when the studio made The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. The ghost of Evans haunts Pandora’s Box, which covers the time some perhaps premature ...”

“... nothing but ‘growing threats to the American peace established at the end of the Cold War’, as Robert Kagan, a former State Department official under Reagan, and William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, wrote in an essay collection called Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defence Policy, published in 2000, the election ...”

“... has become a common coin of complacency. As the countdown to Iraq proceeded, the British diplomat Robert Cooper, special adviser on security to Blair, and later to Prodi as head of the Commission, explained the merits of empire to readers of Prospect. ‘A system in which the strong protect the weak, in which the efficient and well-governed export stability ...”

“... the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, were to blame for the severity of the pandemic. ‘We must be frank about one of the primary reasons this outbreak spun out of control,’ Azar said.There was a failure by this organisation to obtain the information that the world needed, and that failure cost many lives … In an apparent attempt to conceal this ...”

“... friend who had done most to look after the dying Acker and whom she had appointed her executor. Frank Molinaro, whom Acker had paid for astrological advice, passed out business cards in the car park, then grabbed hold of the vase with the cremains in it. ‘The astrologer ran toward the sea tossing handfuls of ash and bone while he proclaimed ...”

“... of the common good and the unselfishness and ability to administer it’. An Eton teacher, ‘Red Robert’ Birley, had encouraged him to read the Marxist economist Harold Laski and to visit the school’s ‘mission’ in London’s East End, which David had found ‘very useful as it gives me an opportunity of becoming acquainted with members of the middle ...”

“... Arthur Cameron Corbett’, as he introduced himself to Ashley after initially using the alias ‘Frank’ – presented himself as a frequenter of male brothels and a cross-dresser who, when he looked into the mirror, never liked what he saw: ‘You want the fantasy to appear right. It utterly failed to appear right in my eyes.’ He then explained how, from ...”