“... at UCLA with several of the anthropologists on whose work he draws, including Barbara Myerhoff and Peter Furst; the university was also home to such scholars as Marija Gimbutas and Carlo Ginzburg, who had found shamanic traces in the archaeology and folklore of prehistoric and medieval Europe.This new turn displaced armchair ethnography with ...”

“... Tyrant of English. I regret To see this marvellous swift metre Demean its heritage, and peter Into mere Hudibrastic tricks, Unapostolic knacks and knicks. But why take all this quite so badly? I would not, had I world and time To wait for reason, rhythm, rhyme To reassert themselves, but sadly The time is not remote when I Will not be here to ...”

“... of his rage at intrusions into his privacy, and one remembers him forcing the withdrawal of John Peter’s article from Essays in Criticism because it suggested a homosexual element in his relationship with Jean Verdenal. Lyndall Gordon reports a conversation with Mary Trevelyan which makes him seem mildly amused about this imputation, but his first reaction ...”

“... book is high. Hellman is not the only snotty famous person to fall under her jaded eye. James Taylor and Carly Simon, Hellman’s guests one sunny afternoon, ‘smile stiffly’ at Mahoney when she brings coffee in on a serving tray, but otherwise ignore her. Mike Nichols and John Hersey win grudging approval – the former for giving her a nice ...”

“... set up as the result of an initiative by the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, James Prior. The following year, Adams, already an Assembly member, became MP for West Belfast (he held the seat in 1987 before losing it to the SDLP in 1992). At the same time, Adams, McGuinness and other Northerners displaced the Party’s old leadership in ...”

“... richer tradition than Kissinger’s example suggests. Stretching from Randolph Bourne and William James to George Kennan and William Fulbright, the pragmatic realist tradition in American diplomatic thought held that it was necessary to consider the consequences of ideas and had an outlook characterised by a humane, cosmopolitan restraint in foreign and ...”

“... do for the bedazzling, now-dead she-eminence. The most beautiful photo I downloaded was one that Peter Hujar took of her in the 1970s, around the time of I, Et Cetera. She’s wearing a thin grey turtleneck and lies on her back – arms up, head resting on her clasped hands and her gaze fixed impassively on something to the right of the frame. There’s a ...”

“... your thought’. She is delighted to accept. This is joltingly hard to read today – even P.D. James, no slave to political correctness, calls it ‘blatant misogyny’. It goes a long way to ruining what is otherwise a prime example of golden age detective fiction. Sayers gets into similar difficulties with the character of Harriet Vane, who is unmarried ...”

“... stalemate filled with rumours, conspiracy theories: drugs, communists, the IRA, the Angry Brigade, Peter Hain. ‘The demons proliferate … The enemy is lurking everywhere. He – or increasingly she – is behind everything … Nevertheless, in its varying and protean forms, official society – the state, the political leadership, the opinion leaders, the ...”

“... the last to be born are, soberingly, Stephen Adrian Lawrence (1974-93, ‘murder victim’) and James Patrick Bulger (1990-93, ‘murder victim’). And so ends the 20th century. Turning from subjects to contributors, the roll-call is undeniably impressive; surely no other project could come near to matching the success of the ODNB in commanding the labour ...”

“... of the left have continued to up the ante. Judd Apatow: ‘Trump is a Nazi. The debate is over.’ Peter Fonda: ‘We should rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with paedophiles.’ Advisers to the president and members of his cabinet have been mobbed and jeered, denied service in restaurants, and harassed at home; and more such ...”

“... near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room’. Eliot had referred in 1918 to Henry James’s ‘merciless clairvoyance’ as a perception of relations rather than entities: ‘It is in the chemistry of these subtle substances, these curious precipitates and explosive gases which are suddenly formed by the contact of mind with mind, that ...”

“... no, I can quite see how it might fail a seriousness test. (One can almost hear the shade of Peter Cook, intoning regretfully how he ‘never had the reading for the spying’.) Lord Kim, on the other hand, might just about have served, given the fact that H. St John Philby got himself called everything from sahib to tuan all across the British ...”

“... views would naturally command the assent of rational working men. ‘There can be no doubt,’ James Mill had written, ‘that the middle rank, which gives to science, to art, and to legislation itself their most distinguished ornaments, and is the chief source of all that has exalted and refined human nature, is that portion of the community of which, if ...”

“... week of the American premiere of The Rake’s Progress – one finds that the boon-companions were Peter Bartok, Edmund Wilson, Fritz Reiner, Rudolph Bing, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Paco Lagerstrom, Auden, Kallman, Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Stravinsky was, however, saddled at this time as on several occasions with the chaotic if aristocratic poet Edward ...”