“... prompted animistic dread. Were you supposed to stand right on the spot under which the dead person lay? Could he feel your presence through the grass? If so, it was creepy, possibly even foolhardy, to be there. Might he not, late at night, get up from his grave, glide down Artillery Road, and seek you out? Southern California, a place entirely lacking in ...”

“... back through his pieces for the paper, and the reviews of his books, among them a glowing piece by Paul Foot in 1986, is to know that he isn’t easily pinned down. Yet if there were laws against inciting party political hatred, Johnson would have been fined and marginalised as a red-baiter on many occasions in many countries: he is a reliable, aggressive ...”

“... has started, which I’m always impressed by. In the unlikely event of my being asked to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph I’d have to decline, if only because I couldn’t walk the few steps backwards it requires. Not the least of the queen’s achievements is that she can still do this in her nineties.26 November. A new biography of Graham ...”

“... Kaminskys might have been among them, had it not been for the efforts of Adolfo’s older brother, Paul, who successfully petitioned the Argentine consul in Paris. In January 1944, they were released. ‘Why us, and why not them?’ Adolfo wondered. In Paris, he bought chemistry books from bouquinistes along the Seine and taught himself to make explosives. But ...”

“... a definitive list of the pet names used by the family. Nancy was Koko at home, Pauline or Paul to her husband, Susan to her sister Jessica, who was also Susan to her in return. Jessica was always Decca, except when Susan. Deborah was usually Debo, though frequently also Nine (a reference to her supposed mental age) or Tiny Swine (rhyming ...”

“... threatens to stifle for ever the essential life of the characters. Think, for instance, of Paul Morel, who is left at the end of Sons and Lovers totally bereft, but walking towards – well, what? Like Alvina Houghton in The Lost Girl, like Aaron Sisson, Gilbert Noon has to get right out and become ‘unEnglished’, as Lawrence puts it. So he is ...”

“... clothes torn to tatters, which flapped about his white thighs. He put on some clothes of mine and lay panting and sighing after the luxurious enjoyment of so much exercise.’His openness wasn’t typical of the rest of his family either. Julian’s younger sister, Angelica, wrote bitterly in her memoir Deceived with Kindness about the way her mother’s ...”

“... CPA fostered.* When the auditors first commented on the CPA’s lack of accountability, its boss, Paul Bremer, bullishly replied that their report ‘does not meet the standards Americans have come to expect of the inspector general’. In his just published memoirs, Bremer dwells on infighting within George Bush’s cabinet and his claim that he tried and ...”

“... levelled at him. He has ransacked the archives and interviewed over two hundred people in order to lay a ghost which has haunted him since his childhood. As a boy, he tells us, he grew up believing that the Second World War was ‘a just and moral crusade’ ending in a victory over tyranny. The British had fought in the expectation that ‘with victory would ...”

“... criticism directed at him or his work by his friends. When the arch-Catholic poet and playwright Paul Claudel begged him not to publish an overtly gay passage in his 1914 novel Les Caves du Vatican, Gide corresponded with him at length (and agreed to the publication of their complete correspondence). He did not drop the offending passage – in fact he and ...”

“... at distance about beauty’s throne. There worship and admire, and then they die, Daring no more lay hold of her than I. Reason to worth bears a submissive spirit, But fools can be familiar with merit. Who but that blund’ring blockhead Phaeton Could e’er have thought to drive about the sun? Just such another durst make love to you, Whom not ambition led ...”

“... courteous, but demanding and uncommunicative Kubrick. Raphael is often very funny (a tanned Jean-Paul Belmondo, glimpsed in a Paris café, ‘looks like a crème brûlée with white hair’), and he has a good ear for speech patterns, so that we do consistently seem to hear Kubrick speaking (‘Freddie? Can you talk?’ ‘You’re stopping work for ...”

“... pregnancy she had a miscarriage which left her infertile. That misfortune, according to MacCabe, lay behind the ‘sorrow and death’ of the fallen-woman melodrama Vivre sa vie (1962). And the break-up of Godard and Karina’s stormy marriage found expression in the fugitive-couple melodrama of the intermittently musical and finally suicidal Pierrot le fou ...”

“... there. But the illusion of democratisation nevertheless deserves special examination. Why did Paul Wolfowitz and a few others argue, with reported sincerity, that a democratic Iraq was vital to America’s national security interests? True, they did not anticipate the exorbitant costs of the war, in lives and money. But they did assert that Iraqi ...”

“... The methods of the medieval masons were complicated and ‘would have been difficult to explain to lay people, even supposing that the masons had wanted to – which they didn’t’. New features could be introduced without any sense of anachronism, rather as a new picture may be hung in an old house. ‘Britain’ itself was still a semi-mythic ...”