“... dies. Best known, I suppose, for the Henry Root letters, back in 1961 Willie, in partnership with Donald Albery, put on Beyond the Fringe. A deceptively gentle and kindly figure Willie was never condescending as Albery invariably was and seemed as much at sea in the world of show business as we were. By the time he came into our lives and though he was not ...”

“... busted many of Dahl’s many self-mythologisations) and the huge ‘official’ one by Donald Sturrock, which, while seeking to bring out the best in Dahl, doesn’t conceal his self-aggrandising side.Through the mid-1960s Dahl wrote film scripts, variously hacked about and supplemented by other hands, including the screenplay for the ...”

“... a press conference and announced that they would be suing the agency. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, was alerted to the danger by his deputy, Dick Cheney. The Olsons received a settlement of $750,000 in exchange for dropping their legal action, and were invited to the White House, where Ford made them a public apology.As the Rockefeller report ...”

“... Preston Sturges​ died in August 1959, when Donald Trump was thirteen years old. So it’s not his fault that the uses to which the grandiose Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach has more recently been put include the development of a club of which Jeffrey Epstein was briefly a member, as well as an impromptu storage facility for state secrets ...”

“... Marques during the war? Perhaps Cyril Connolly said the last word on the spy story when in ‘Bond strikes camp’ he pictured 007 being nearly seduced by a C monstrously attired in drag. The spy story continues to flourish, but no longer do upper-class heroes outwit von Stumm and Hilda von Einem as they did in Greenmantle. Giles Railton, the hero of John ...”

“... thinking along these lines – or thinking at all about the drastic turn that matters were taking. Donald McLachlan, who’d covered the burning of the Reichstag and then the trial for the Times, was now teaching at the school. By the time he arrived, Frank and his friend M.R.D. Foot – later New College and SOE – had already read McLachlan’s reports of ...”

“... for the New Yorker in which she somewhat mournfully observed that, following the election of Donald Trump, ‘the personal-essay boom is over’: ‘Individual perspectives do not, at the moment, seem like a trustworthy way to get to the bottom of a subject.’ She sticks her Facebook profile into the book anyway, though regular readers of her work will ...”

“... a public health catastrophe and an economic disaster at the same time. And to make matters worse, Donald Trump appears tempted to juggle the two.Since 2008, the world economy has come to depend to a disconcerting degree on government stimulus. No one can pretend that our reality bears much resemblance to the pristine market models so popular in the 1980s and ...”

“... but afterwards regretted that he had only raised the profile of the ‘intellectuals’ James Bond’. What Baldwin and other contemporaries didn’t know, but Tanenhaus has discovered, is that the Buckley family clandestinely funded a segregationist newspaper, the Camden News of South Carolina, in the mid-1950s. What’s surprising here is that the ...”

“... Intercept, probably leaked by Khan, revealed that in March 2022 the US State Department official Donald Lu told the Pakistani ambassador that a move against Khan would mean ‘all will be forgiven in Washington’.Khan still claims that the US was involved in the coup against him, claiming that the no-confidence vote which brought down his government in ...”

“... I’ve come dressed in my usual work clothes: black dinner jacket and the signature James Bond Omega watch.’Less than a week later, Steele was denounced as a ‘reputation-mauler for hire’ and faced the prospect of ruinous legal action over allegedly feeding an MP knowingly false claims that a British businessman was a Kremlin agent. His ...”

“... Just before the 2024 US presidential election, Rogan put out a supine three-hour interview with Donald Trump, who delivered his usual portion of lies, idiocies and bluster. Six years earlier, one of Rogan’s guests had been Penrose. The tweedily attired scientist didn’t patronise and the sweatshirted interviewer was duly star-struck: ‘I’m a big fan ...”

“... 33, dark hair, brown eyes, 5 ft 5 in., weight 135, slender; Helen Steele 6 years old, brown eyes; Donald Steele 2 years old, blue eyes; Mrs H.O. Wheeler Age 55, iron grey hair, eyes grey, 5 ft 2 in., heavy set, weight 150 lbs. The fire chief was killed. People fought fires with wine. Refugees wandered through the streets with parrots on their shoulders and ...”

“... to such behaviour because they fall outside the civilising processes of the West. Thus beneath Donald Rumsfeld’s magnificently evasive ‘Stuff happens’ – the formula allows us to think for a second that such things might happen to anyone, including presumably us, or even him – we glimpse a much harsher, discriminatory form of judgment. Between ...”

“... when ‘the Movement’ was first identified, a group of writers that included Amis, Larkin, Wain, Donald Davie, Robert Conquest and others. As J.D. Scott put it in the baptismal piece in the Spectator, ‘The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible.’ Amis in particular had, as ...”