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“... told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did myself.’ Stephen Spender, who met Jennings in Germany in 1945, noticed the film-maker’s ‘bumptious expression’, as well as his ‘pin-head face’ and ‘flapping ears’. Jennings talked and talked, a great gush of words: about art, theatre and history; about ...”

“... but of Bernard Donoghue, Gordon Brown, Helen Liddell, Alistair Campbell and Charlie Whelan. Stephen Byers and Robinson are currently trying to prevent the sale of Bower’s book, but one would like to hear how others mentioned here respond. Of course, Labour sleaze is nothing new, though it did not, in Attlee’s day, get anywhere near the top. Ever ...”

“... depth, borrowing extensively from le Carré’s odd, unhappy childhood and his experiences as a young intelligence officer in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet the effort often seems misplaced, in part because his attempts to create character-driven narratives continue to lean on genre conventions. Unfaithful wives, shrewd yet eccentric crones and idealistic ...”

“... preordained about the collapse of the tsarist autocracy nor even of the Provisional Government,’ Stephen Smith writes, in his sober, well-researched and comprehensive history. Sean McMeekin seconds this, affirming that ‘the events of 1917 were filled with might-have-beens and missed chances’ while at the same time tipping his hat to show who the ...”

“... of the Journal of Botany’, Swartz posted a few tweets about the case. The lead prosecutor, Stephen Heymann, described this as a ‘wild internet campaign’ that moved the case ‘to an institutional level’. In November 2011, nine more felony counts were added. There were several rounds of plea negotiations: the jail time on offer in exchange for a ...”

“... power ‘racists, fascists and separatists’? In The Light That Failed (2019), Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the rise of illiberalism in Eastern Europe was a consequence of the West’s imposition of its liberal-democratic system on countries to which it was ill-suited. They describe the response of Eastern Europeans to Western political and ...”

“... AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus … in the national pro-Israel effort’. The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately ...”

“... for Roubiliac’s statue of Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the ...”

“... contest within the BBC had been between the guardians of the Reithian heritage and provocative young producers in drama and satire who sought to turn the BBC into a site of political and cultural opposition. During most of that time, there was a fragile armistice – even sometimes an alliance – between satirists, drama producers and documentary makers ...”

“... dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of its circulation. It belonged to the era of what Lewis calls the ‘benign monopolies of English life’ – the BBC, the NHS, Penguin paperbacks – as yet unconcerned about ‘low-grade competition from upstart rivals’. The ...”

“... and sorry for both of them. Jarrell wrote to his wife about Allen Tate’s ‘Ode to Our Young Pro-Consuls of the Air’, a poem which ends with the Dalai Lama being exterminated from the air, saying it was ‘certainly poor and annoying … I thought the Dalai Lama almost the only touch of imagination.’ When he wrote to Tate on the same subject he ...”

“... lecturer; another, ignoring us completely as they all do, sits working by himself and could be a young broker in the City. Their history teacher talks about them quietly and the problems she and they have, particularly non-attendance, and it all seems a long way from the sixth form that I’ve written. 1 March. In the accounts I have seen of Sir Andrew ...”

“... coincides with the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the ...”

“... and very much later, in the case of those of Galicia and the Russian shtetls. Even in America, as Stephen Thernstrom reports in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ‘until well into the 20th century the majority of the immigrants could recall, or had come directly from, a traditional Jewish society.’ The bulk of the Sephardim too remained ...”

“... same period made up the New Poems of 1907 and 1908. Forget the horrid and ubiquitous Letters to a Young Poet, forget Duino, forget The Sonnets to Orpheus. They are for me his greatest poems, and Malte his greatest book.The New Poems are written under the shadow of ‘mon grand ami Auguste Rodin’, to whom the second (1908) volume was dedicated: Rilke had ...”