“... collars, and grey flannel suits march down city streets lined with offices and banks. Auschwitz may have been a world away from Levittown, but in Hannah Arendt’s vision of totalitarianism – ‘destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other’ – postwar writers found an apt description of social life as a whole. When Betty Friedan ...”

“... Given​ how many of those who worked closely with Robert Maxwell wrote a book about him, it’s interesting that so many facts about him remain unclear. Did he face a death sentence at the age of sixteen? Was he in the French Foreign Legion? In the months before his death, in 1991, was he really being investigated for a war crime? Did MI6 finance his first business in order to recruit Soviet scientists? Was he a KGB asset? Did he have a financial relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? ‘He has done more for Israel than can be said here today,’ Yitzhak Shamir said at his funeral ...”

“... swiftly along and has hardly time to ask himself, “Is this fact or fiction or both?” till he may be led to search, as not a few have searched before him, for The Life and Adventures of Joseph Sell.’ The point of the Joseph Sell hint is that Borrow claimed to have written a novel of that name. In fact, a whole chapter of his ...”

“... selves, as connoisseurs, collectors, lovers of theatre and occasional readers of books. Thus on 20 May this year it offered them a Special Historic Edition, whose gilded cover proclaimed ‘The greatest discovery in 400 years’ – nothing less than ‘Shakespeare: His true likeness revealed at last’. The detective who had ‘cracked the Tudor code’ was ...”

“... of intermarriage, despite hundreds of thousands of years of separate evolution. Although this may be possible in principle, it is unlikely in practice, because of the zoological observation that species with extensive ranges tend to fray at the edges. There are several examples of animals which belong to the same species, but to opposite ends of its ...”

“... In opposition, Harold Wilson spoke out against American involvement in Vietnam. In May 1954, during his Bevanite phase, he declared that ‘not a man, not a gun, must be sent from this country to defend French colonisation in Indo-China … we must not join or in any way encourage an anti-Communist crusade in Asia under the leadership of the Americans or anyone else ...”

“... Gaudier-Brzeska, and to Ezra Pound’s first translations from the Chinese – a Britain that we may think of as snuffed out on the Somme, though on the contrary it seems to have been given its quietus by the depraved insouciance of Bloomsbury. As Tomlinson writes the history, it goes like this: The wave of energy throughout Europe and England, which made ...”

“... are delivered to a public with longer evenings for reading and Christmas money to spend. It may not be anywhere near as clearly marked off as it is in New York and the launching machinery still creaks a bit, but its component parts are familiar from the smoother-running American model. Some six months before publication, fabulous, record-breaking deals ...”

“... The business imagination has been coming into its own in other ways as well. Management Studies may still be considered disreputable in some quarters of the university, but it is no longer that makeshift department of Nissen huts kept off the well-tended preserves of the traditional academic disciplines. The liberal academy’s green-belt areas are now well ...”

“... possibly by Hitler will cost you roughly $4500. The 1938 Mercedes which he gave to Eva Braun may cost you $350,000. You can find the trade prices in Der Gauleiter, a magazine published in Arkansas. The annual turnover is estimated at $50 million. As the economic function of the villages of Western Europe and the United States gradually becomes that of ...”

“... in The Beauties and Furies. When they do not, something is up. These rancid, cancerous homes may provide a useful apprenticeship in the nature of tyranny (several times in The Man Who Loved Children Stead stresses that children have ‘no rights’ within the family): that is all. The only escape is a plunge into an exponential whirl of furnished ...”

“... But even Melville might have blenched at Browning’s final exordium: So, British Public, who may like me yet, (Marry and amen!) learn one lesson hence Of many which whatever lives should teach: This lesson, that our human speech is naught, Our human testimony false, our fame And human estimation words and wind. So that’s it. The British Public might ...”

“... not be easy to name more recent comedians likely to win his approval. He quotes a letter from Robert Graves which, although it is about the poetry, gives an accurate representation of the way Fuller often sees his personality: ‘oppressed, stoical, humorous’, and not given to ‘chancing his arm’. There are various asides in which he speaks of a ...”

“... documented as a mere hangover. (Waugh’s letters, announced for publication in the autumn, may further muddy the water for any future autobiographers among his enemies.) The Paris visit provides several more agreeable recollections, like that of seeing Lady Diana’s Chinese chiropodist ‘move reverentially towards the bottom of the bed’ at her ...”

“... Donoughue from first page to last is anxious to impress us with the qualities of his colleagues. Robert Armstrong (yes, Robert Armstrong) was ‘warm, complex, sensitive – a marvellous team member’. Robin Butler was ‘the most outstanding civil servant with whom I ever had to deal’ (and, some ninety pages ...”