“... intellectuals who have made it,’ he wrote. And no one was busting his buttons more than the man at the top of Commentary’s masthead. That evening proved to be a preview of coming attractions, an ethos in embryo. Four years later, Norman Podhoretz published a memoir entitled, yes, Making It, a book that would live in notoriety, which at least beats ...”

“... which more anon). But I have neither the ambition nor the talent to be a serious chronicler de nos jours. The only time in my life I tried to do a Boswell was after an evening on which Elias Canetti had unexpectedly invited himself to supper with us alone. But when, the following morning, I looked through the notes of his conversation which I’d made ...”

“... eventual reduction in mind. He is equally critical of the anthropocentric fallacy which makes of man the measure of the universe and the goal of the evolutionary process. He therefore parts company with those architects of theistic evolution, such as Teilhard de Chardin, for whom the branches of the evolutionary tree point ...”

“... be barely noticeable: they wouldn’t register as a subject. The poets Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley published a book in 2011 called Edgelands, including chapters titled ‘Cars’, ‘Paths’, ‘Dens’, ‘Containers’, ‘Landfill’, ‘Sewage’, ‘Wire’; but this was a series of essays, championing the overlooked at unnecessary ...”

“... successors to the Communist Party, which had been dissolved in 1991. By that time, a dapper young man, Gianfranco Fini, had replaced Almirante as leader of the MSI. Fini promised to rejuvenate ‘fascism for the year 2000’, which didn’t stop Berlusconi from endorsing him when he ran for mayor of Rome in 1993. This was the first and, in ...”

“... and religious and mental anguish – to a bookseller whose very name, Lew D. Feldman (lewd fell man, like the fell fiend), was an insult to someone like Spark who had a lifelong interest in anagrams and wordplay. She joked after the sale (again laughing off the pain of life) that ‘some old professor is probably drivelling over them at the moment.’ (I do ...”

“... incendiary pronouncements of 19th-century French reactionaries such as Louis Veuillot and Joseph de Maistre (for example, sovereignty ‘is always one, inviolable and absolute’). Above all, he started to discuss his ultimate preference for Catholic integralism: a subordination of the state to the Church. He proposed various authoritarian schemes, always ...”

“... which had finally come out from an American university press. He did not look like a 70-year-old man. He was tall, his frame was thin but strong, his hair was grey in a crew cut. His accent sounded foreign. His position that night was that of outlaw, of someone who spoke dark and difficult truths which were not acceptable to those who controlled ...”

“... I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN? B. gives me an appraising glance but is non-committal. Then everything lands on our table in a steaming, salsa-drenched pile: guacamole, sour cream and chicken tostadas in huge encephalitic, butterfly-shaped tortillas – nacho chips on steroids – and a ...”

“... backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had read Sartre and de Beauvoir in the French. Chubby, chummy and balding, imperturbably good-humoured and everybody’s pal, Inglis has a distinct resemblance to Bob Hoskins, the interfering busybody and cheer-leader of the current British Telecom ads. He may not, like Hoskins, pop ...”

“... of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles. No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald Richie. ‘Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country,’ he wrote. ‘To be a person so intent upon describing a ...”

“... back through his pieces for the paper, and the reviews of his books, among them a glowing piece by Paul Foot in 1986, is to know that he isn’t easily pinned down. Yet if there were laws against inciting party political hatred, Johnson would have been fined and marginalised as a red-baiter on many occasions in many countries: he is a reliable, aggressive ...”

“... snip, snip – ‘And then I left early.’ This is fitting for a performer it’s almost de rigueur to call ‘iconic’. The price of entrance is paid to receive the benison of her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in 1974 Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this ...”

“... of the junta which had ruled Burma since 1962, didn’t seem very significant. Than Shwe was a man of cartoonish charmlessness and crudity, and as prime minister, Thein Sein had been his loyal sidekick, the blinking and bespectacled face of the regime at such international gatherings as it was permitted to attend. Like most of his new ministers, he was a ...”

“... Paris. He was a loner. He was also a deeply gregarious and social being. He was the most eloquent man in the America of his time. His legacy is also one of failure. It is hard to decide what part of him came first. Was the colour of his skin more important than his sexuality? Was his religious upbringing more important than his reading of the American ...”