“... during ‘cut-backs’ which shelved many FTP projects. When he made the cover of Time Magazine in May 1938 (as Shotover in Heartbreak House), they called him a ‘marvellous boy’. But already the snipers were getting into position. Welles devised the War of the Worlds programme (in one week) partly as a spoof to deflate the impregnable authority of ...”

“... and Fury, about the pundit class in Washington, Safire conceded that ‘yes, psychologically, he may have been seeking to minimise the relative importance of the crimes committed by his former boss, with this silliness.’ So now I’ve stopped ‘gating’ and will never try it again, however tempting the locution. As both these books in quite different ...”

“... It is a long-standing custom that no two ships in the Royal Navy, or in the British Merchant Navy, may have the same name. And so it was with SS Montrase. It became the Forfar, no doubt – according to a recent informant in Liverpool – because some wag at the Admiralty was in the habit of doing the football pools. Or he ...”

“... the bonus which distinguishes celebrity from fame? It depends on how you define perversion. There may be a link between shame and celebrity, but we know that there is a link between perversion and shame. Shame, or shaming, with its ostentatious morality, might be seen as a form of perversion in itself. Celebrity is often a ritual of public humiliation. Not ...”

“... reading the London Times. The balloon glass before him had sunk to a low tide. ‘Mr Yeates? May I venture to intrude? I am a journalist. Name of Hunt. The Irish Times.’ Lennox wearily levered his torso forward to look down at Hunty’s brown and punctured shoe tops. As slowly he lowered himself backward to look strabismally into Hunty’s boyish ...”

“... meanings.’ These words look back to work already done, and forward to a different future. But we may hear in them a note of exaltation that will sound strange to anyone who thinks about the teaching of poetry in modern universities. Perhaps we have lost confidence in the poets, as Richards himself partly did. Certainly most of us are not convinced that he ...”

“... time when talk of such things can seem fuelled only by machismo, vanity and vicious buffoonery. He may have been mistaken in his self-watching (though he’s more honest a writer than most) and mad with ambition, but it might also be said that he has kept watch over the Republic in ways too various, and too arresting, to be summarily dismissed. He has now, in ...”

“... Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be looked after, sometimes dominated, by a series of maternal ...”

“... look spineless in the face of Serb and Croat terror, has produced a subsidiary institution which may be the most important legacy of the war. In one way this is history repeating itself, for in 1945 it was US pressure that led to the creation of the International Military Tribunal which sat at Nuremberg. During the Yalta Conference, Stalin proposed a toast ...”

“... motive for lethal Kennedy-hatred among disaffected CIA and Mafia types, insofar as the two species may be distinguished. The explanation turns out to be relatively simple, and consistent with the known facts. Kennedy was waiting to hear that Castro had been assassinated in Havana. When he didn’t hear, he calmly betrayed the mercenary force as the laws of ...”

“... she still lives in Cergy.I’ve pieced this together from my reading, and googling, and I may well have things wrong. Ernaux hasn’t written about her life in a neat this-then-that sort of way. Reading her is like getting to know a friend, the way they tell you about themselves over long conversations that sometimes take years, revealing things ...”

“... they’d let him get away with it, and, if not, he was at the end of his life anyway. Sebba may be right that his ‘recollections of the Rosenbergs have to be treated with extreme caution’, or at least some scepticism, but in twenty years no one has contradicted the substance of his account, and he often writes against his own interest. He says that ...”

“... soldier takes any notice of it, he continues to play his game of darts or draughts or whatever it may be. When, on the other hand, someone tunes into Lord Haw-Haw, the whole room gets up and gathers round the wireless.’ The War Office wrote to Frederick Ogilvie, who had succeeded Reith as the BBC’s director-general, worrying that Joyce’s ...”

“... years on) with the disruptions licensed by Modernism. His breakthrough to imaginative freedom may have exacerbated this by ‘opening up’ the possibility of an absolute reversion to Romanticism. For all its lovely accomplishment a text such as ‘Squarings’ xl is a shorthand Wordsworthian sonnet about ‘being’ and starlight.Heaney nonchalantly ...”

“... office on 3 September proved to be, in Hunt’s words, a ‘dry hole’. Some months later, on 3 May 1972, on the orders of Colson, the White House arranged to fly some Cuban-American veterans of the Bay of Pigs to Washington from Miami. They were told that Ellsberg (now released on bail) would be attending an anti-war rally on the steps of the Capitol and ...”