“... a stringer for the Observer and the Economist. Beirut made good sense as a posting: his father, St John Philby, a well-known Arabist, was living there at the time, and the Middle East was an area of growing interest to British intelligence. For the first few months, Philby lived with his father in the village of Ajaltoun a few miles outside Beirut. Despite ...”

“... there are 20 contributors, of whom Mr Heffer and Mr Silkin are consigned to non-topics while Mr Foot writes only a short introduction. One wonders what exactly the Shadow Cabinet were hoping to achieve. Perhaps simply to consolidate the relatively recent impression of a united team ready to govern the country. Up to a point they do succeed in this, for ...”

“... of Western Orientalism and of Eastern Occidentalism, both of which Tagore confounded. Edward John Thompson (1886-1946) was then an educational missionary at the Wesleyan College at Bankura. He had published several volumes of verse, and was approaching proficiency in Bengali. After a brief meeting in Calcutta, Tagore invited him to visit him at his ...”

“... about Maud Gonne a great sweetness flows up from his heart’s root, and he shakes from head to foot, he is almost certainly lying. ‘There must have been mornings, such as those when he woke in another woman’s bed, when he let himself off. Did he literally shake from head to foot? It is a banal question, but the poem ...”

“... ever imagine that Dante might be for him what he was for Eliot, what Virgil was for Dante. As John Dunn pointed out in an earlier number of the London Review of Books, this new series has never really asked itself what a past master might be, and the title seems merely to be an excuse to peddle yet more secondary works in an already overloaded ...”

“... inscribed with their names as well as Nixon’s: ‘Here Men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.’ And when Nixon flew out to the aircraft carrier which plucked them from the Pacific, he announced: ‘This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.’ The ...”

“... East-West culture clashes, Poor but Sexy. Freelancers in their early thirties, they live with one foot in London and the other in Warsaw. Agata is the one with Russian and, as a reading of Poor but Sexy suggests, a penchant for film and cultural theory. Hatherley is the one with the eye, the architectural knowledge, and a childhood background in Militant ...”

“... After a lifetime’s campaigning to prove James Hanratty’s innocence, the incorruptible Paul Foot refused to accept the DNA evidence that after all Hanratty had raped Valerie Storie and therefore must have been guilty of the A6 murder. Ultimately, we are not dealing with rival scientific theories. We are dealing with acts of faith. It is no coincidence ...”

“... body, ‘viz. the uterus & kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side’, and so on. The heart was missing, however: ‘the pericardium was open below & the heart absent.’ It may have been burned in the fireplace, which bore evidence of a ‘fire so large as to ...”

“... received a physical deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War because of a problem with his foot, although he can no longer remember which foot. He was a football, squash and tennis player at the time.)African Americans Trump: ‘I have a great relationship with the blacks.’Muslim Americans Trump: ‘They’re ...”

“... been travelling at one knot or less, it can’t have been fun to experience the brunt of the 328 foot, 1625 ton ship pushing him forward in the ice-cold January sea. The cause of this unexpectedly low water was an uncharted sandbar – not the gently shelving beach, which still lay one hundred yards or more ahead. Somehow Kerr managed to find handholds on ...”

“... how Stephen Dedalus, disowning his own parent, searches for another father. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy (1923) Just as Oscar Wilde began to become himself the year after his father’s death, when he was 21, and John Butler Yeats managed, figuratively, to kill his son by going into exile in ...”

“... example, author, with her husband, of My Boy Jack? The Search for Kipling’s Only Son (1998). (John Kipling died in his first half-hour in action – at the age of 18 – at Loos in 1915. Though his stricken father carried on a 20-year search for his grave, his remains were not found until 1992.) When not writing, the Holts run a sprightly operation known ...”

“... worth speculating about. What, for example, is the truth of the legend that James Mill entrusted John Stuart’s political education to Place? Mr Miles does not touch on it. The story told in Iain McCalman’s Radical Underground is told perforce from the outside. There are no personal records to give an inner logic and life to the careers of the early ...”

“... In his memoirs Roy Jenkins describes John Kennedy as the best President of the USA in the past four decades. It is a curious, not to say unfashionable verdict. The demolishers of the Kennedy legend have been carrying all before them in the past few years. So battered is the Kennedy reputation that it is almost time for a new school of revisionist historians to rehabilitate the myth of Camelot on the Potomac ...”