“... such cases was allegedly stood down. Simply by virtue of living as long as he did, Hobsbawm must lay claim to one of the biggest PFs in MI5’s vast back catalogue. Then there’s the smell of the file, the physical residue of ink and carbon and onion paper and the many hands that passed over it, fingertips licked to separate the pages; and the distinct ...”

“... the reasons for the enemy’s victory, ‘it was not only in the field that intellectual causes lay at the root of our defeat.’ (‘Ce n’est pas seulement sur le terrain militaire que notre défaite a eu ses causes intellectuelles’). Viewed morally and aesthetically, Strange Defeat is an impressive document, an indictment written at white heat by a ...”

“... Britain and France as gangsters. What I remember were the things that made us laugh: the column by Paul Jennings that had a tongue-twister about ‘tuskless rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays that we had next to no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate ...”

“... the right hand, oompah for the left: a demi-style that would stand him in good stead when the act lay fallow, and assist an inborn facility for seducing whole lines of chorus girls. The result placed a built-in ceiling on his competence, but it worked nicely as a sight gag for the eye and ear. Harpo would emulate him in this as in other respects, but he was a ...”

“... Alinksy, the Chicago-based community activist and author of Rules for Radicals (1971), Mark and Paul Engler (This Is an Uprising, 2016) and Srdja Popovic, the Serbian advocate of ‘laughtivism’ (Blueprint for Revolution, 2015): XR insists that its interventions should both be fun and poke fun. Gene Sharp, the author of The Politics of Non-Violent Action ...”

“... under. When corporate scandals first hit the headlines early in 2002, the US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill attributed them to the immorality of a ‘small number’ of miscreants. Apparently he’d been misinformed. The rapacious practices of these executives and firms – whether or not technically illegal – are typical of, and endemic to, corporate ...”

“... in Brooklyn with Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, among others, he wrote in his diary: ‘What an epic one could write about this!’ Soon Golo too moved in, having escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his uncle Heinrich, Alma Mahler and Franz ...”

“... account of what happened, despite its having been challenged down to the last detail by Paul Nungesser, the student she accused, who went on to file his own complaint against the university for violating his Title IX rights by allowing Sulkowicz to continue with her protest piece, for which she received academic credit. (Columbia settled with him ...”

“... Published in 1605, Espejo de Paciencia (‘The Looking-Glass of Patience’) is a long poem that lay forgotten for more than two centuries, until it was rediscovered in 1834. It was about that time that Jose Maria de Heredia (cousin to the French Heredia, famous for his Trophée) wrote what is considered the first Romantic poem ever written in ...”

“... judged a failure of the times. She was written off as a hysteric but argued that the main problem lay ‘in my ability to assume the receptive attitude, that cardinal virtue in women’. ‘Her illness was a form of self-assertion,’ Strouse adds, and it was soon decided that she should go to Bournemouth, where they knew how to take such things ...”

“... no idea what their procedures were. That is perhaps the only excuse for Henry James, who wrote to Paul Bourget that Wilde’s sentence to hard labour was too severe, that isolation would have been more just.’ Close to Wilde’s release date, the governor of Reading Gaol said to Ross: ‘He looks well. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a ...”

“... the words “beyond reasonable doubt” enough.’ Sarah opened a box of Ferrero Rocher and we lay on the bed discussing it all. I repeated the phrase I’d used weeks before when I talked to Jamie Byng. ‘I want to give you a crash course in self-deprecation.’ He said he had been far more self-deprecating before the custody battle for his son, which ...”

“... major song and Etta one of the supreme live performers. Once, at a surreal outdoor concert at the Paul Masson Winery, marooned among pre-tech-stock-crash Silicon Valley yuppies dutifully sipping Chardonnay, I watched her do the plumpest, most lascivious cakewalk imaginable. But I could hardly live on her for the rest of the day. I started squawking like an ...”