“... after that, the Soviet Union collapsed. In 1993 he returned to London.During his next posting, in Paris, Steele’s cover was blown after a list of more than a hundred MI6 agents working in embassies around the world was leaked on the internet. This public outing put paid to his career as a field agent. After his posting to ...”

“... retreat, and the population of London quadrupled between 1550 and 1700. It was rapidly overtaking Paris, and the West End, with its salubrious air and proximity to the Houses of Parliament and the Court of St James’s, was more attractive than ever. Its rise was unstoppable, its nature always mutable. There was no crisis from which it did not emerge ...”

“... Bolsheviks – that was ... incomprehensible.’ ‘In the Thirties,’ Arthur Miller told the Paris Review, ‘it was, to me, inconceivable that a socialist government could be really anti-semitic. It just could not happen.’ Donald Ogden Stewart stood out for Sayre among the Hampstead blacklistees in part because he came from her parents’ world. Like ...”

“... the dirty postcard lines – about eight or nine lines, good lines – and I asked the actor Barry McGovern if I should confess to Karel or not. All the Beckett fans were there, very deep, very solemn, and this boy from the audience looked up and said: ‘I was very interested, Mr Reisz, in why you cut the postcard scene.’ Karel just threw me one of ...”

“... in Other Passports. They are all formal verse and one of them, ‘To Pete Atkin: Letter from Paris’, was his initial attempt at ottava rima, the stanza chosen later for his extended verse diaries. In a letter slightly earlier than the one to Atkin, he sets out what by then had become, and was to remain for many years, his creed. Interestingly, this ...”

“... claim in a way he did not intend: they have faded into obscurity.While studying and teaching in Paris in the 1930s, Senghor and a group of Caribbean intellectuals and writers, most prominently Léon Damas and Aimé Césaire, had spearheaded the literary movement known as négritude, an assertion of black identity and civilisation and a proclamation, at ...”

“... death more or less ensured that Johnson would be elected the following year, but when he defeated Barry Goldwater with 61 per cent of the vote and the largest popular margin in American history, it seemed a ringing endorsement of his liberal vision and a trouncing of Goldwater’s small government conservatism. With this mandate, Johnson ended formalised Jim ...”

“... dialogues with Peter Cook left very little to the imagination, so it’s not unlikely.23 March. Barry Cryer brings a good deal of old-fashioned joy into my life, as I’m sure he does for many others. His phone calls always begin, ‘It’s your stalker,’ after which without introduction he tells his latest joke. This morning’s was told originally by ...”

“... Club, devoting his spare time to independence struggles, Ireland’s included. As a laundryman in Paris in 1920, he co-founded the French Communist Party, and in 1923 went as its delegate to the Communist International in Moscow. In late 1924 he was sent to the Comintern headquarters for Asia in Canton. In and out of Chinese and British jails, he steadily ...”

“... typical correspondents are his business agents in the Greek islands, his banker friend Charles Barry in Genoa, and the Greek Committee in London. The tone is, according to your taste, practical or already middle-aged. Perhaps, as Marchand suggests, the Greek leader Prince Mavrocordatos was flattering Byron and encouraging him to spend more of his money ...”

“... uncommunicative Kubrick. Raphael is often very funny (a tanned Jean-Paul Belmondo, glimpsed in a Paris café, ‘looks like a crème brûlée with white hair’), and he has a good ear for speech patterns, so that we do consistently seem to hear Kubrick speaking (‘Freddie? Can you talk?’ ‘You’re stopping work for Christmas?’ ‘Think that was about ...”

“... legitimacy. His temper here was the reverse of sincere aspirants such as Benjamin Haydon and James Barry, and he scored a second hit with Titianus Redivivus; – or – the Seven-Wise-Men Consulting the New Venetian Oracle. His target had delivered itself ready-made. Ann Jemima Provis and her father, Thomas, had hoodwinked West and seven other academicians to ...”

“... 1945. His compatriot Karl Roemer, an advocate-general to the court, spent the war in occupied Paris managing French companies and banks for the Third Reich; after the war, he married Adenauer’s niece, and acted as defence lawyer for the Waffen SS charged with responsibility for the massacre of the occupants of the French village of Oradour. The other ...”

“... He oversaw the break-up of his Barjac studios and the removal of artworks to new hangars in Paris. The site was convenient. It was ‘out by the airport, beside the motorway to Germany’. Lyttle’s effects, when he absconded from his council-sanctioned room, were impounded. The tapes of the interview with Russo were among the books and shoes and ...”

“... too and so gets the audience going. Their arrival at the theatre comes shortly after that of Barry Manilow, who is puzzled to find press and paparazzi abruptly deserting him as they go in pursuit of grander quarry. The Prince is very enthusiastic about the play when he goes round afterwards, though I’d have thought the chances of him persuading his ...”