“... right’s swivel-eyed homophobia. A surprising number of gay men top the Trumpist pyramid (Peter Thiel, for instance, or the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent) and others lurk on its digital outskirts, but O’Neill isn’t one of them. He obviously didn’t believe his statements undermined his heterosexuality. Presumably this would be a risk only if ...”

“... He knew what he wanted to achieve. The problem was that his father, now in the South of France, was considerably more ambivalent about his duties. Some of this arose from Mann’s fears of losing his readers in Germany and having his assets confiscated. But it also had to do with an old argument about Germany which Mann had had with his brother ...”

“... what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England. Fanny’s ...”

“... hope to that saving possibility and not hold out against the occupying forces. His biographer, Peter Dodge, traces all the tortuous visions and revisions that led up to this ultimate misjudgment. He sees Hendrik de Man as a tragic figure, forced into exile (and convicted of treason in his absence), not so much through opportunism, compromise or worse, as ...”

“... savage reductions in jobs and welfare and a climate of job insecurity and social demoralisation. France, Germany and the rest of the EU nations are, after all, straining mightily to reach the Maastricht target of a 3 per cent budget deficit. If that is difficult for G7 states it is going to be tough indeed for South Africa, where there is less fat to ...”

“... And he was broke. He was living what Stevens and Swan call ‘an almost feral life’ when he met Peter Lacy. Lacy was handsome, six years younger than Bacon and played the piano in nightclubs. He ‘had no interest in the literary or art world,’ Stevens and Swan write. ‘He did not conceal his dislike for Bacon’s paintings. In fact, his indifference ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... more than a year later thanks, in part, to US pressure orchestrated by her old Harvard friend Peter Galbraith. She later described the period in her memoir, Daughter of the East (1988); it included photo-captions such as: ‘Shortly after President Reagan praised the regime for making “great strides towards democracy”, Zia’s henchmen gunned down ...”

“... on friendly terms with men such as William Godwin and the great satirical poet John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’, whom Pitt’s government regarded as dangerously disloyal.Friendship was his true vocation and chief talent, and he worked at it tirelessly. The great majority of his numerous poems – he described them, without false modesty, as ...”

“... round gone ahead, it would have seen the country rally round the opponent of the extremist, as in France, resulting in victory for Lasconi. Even if Georgescu had won, parliament could have kept him in check. So the election shouldn’t have been cancelled? ‘They shouldn’t have done it.’ During my stay I rented an apartment in Bucharest’s Old Town, in ...”

“... Left to his own devices, Putin would have preferred to say the bare minimum about it. But once France and Germany came out against the impending invasion, it was not easy for him to sidle quietly off-stage. On a visit to Paris, Chirac cornered him into a joint communiqué opposing the war – though the French alone threatened a veto in the Security ...”

“... an arch with a kink at one end like a giant dog ball thrower, is, according to its designer Peter Jenkins, the first of its kind in the world. ‘I’d like to think that George Stephenson would have approached the challenge in a similar manner, laying the new railway infrastructure over the old,’ he told the Manchester Evening News. Even the Chinese ...”

“... of Hobsbawm in its own records, which were housed in the Registry, described by the MI5 veteran Peter Wright as ‘a mass of dry paper’ inside which ‘were warm trails waiting to be followed’. This repository, containing an estimated 500,000 files by the mid-1950s, was organised according to an elaborate system of cross-referencing between Personal ...”

“... was exactly the mot juste ... or was it? I was reminded of a short story by Anatole France, which made a deep impression on me when I read it a long time ago. It’s about a woman who invents a fictitious character called Putois as an excuse for getting out of any boring social engagement, and this figment of her imagination gradually assumes a ...”

“... a complicated bastard, which is why he needed so many alter egos (Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol) to thrash himself out.Any efforts at fine-shading Roth’s behaviour with women into a three-dimensional portrait runs into the problem of his two marriages. If any man had been shaped by nature and disposition to be a permanent bachelor, a ...”