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“... she disliked American academic life, especially in California. She was deeply uncomfortable in Berkeley: she describes the Hoover Institution at Stanford, which contains an extremely rich collection of historical sources, as ‘one of those modern hells with all the comforts’. She preferred to live independently in her flat in New York, which was ...”

“... party planned in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the inauguration of the Italia Prize in 1949, until 1955, of 15 entries ...”

“... so completely with the characters he played in films, such as the idealised football player George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American (1940), that they took up long-term residence in his consciousness. As president, Reagan routinely invoked the Notre Dame star when he implored subordinates to ‘go out there and win one for the Gipper.’ A Regular ...”

“... and even for some a kind of personal cross. Of the leading German Marxist thinkers, only George Lukacs had (immediately) chosen Moscow; and there he was to remain until the end of the Second World War, true to the party he had joined in 1918 and apparently at one with the Stalinist consequences of the Leninism to which he had fully committed himself ...”

“... an idealist) phenomenon of ‘outness’, a favourite word he had unearthed in Bishop Berkeley; and a large element of his huge and contradictory mind remained deeply attached to those ‘external things’ that were otherwise meant obligingly to fleet away before the enchantments of Mind. Wordsworth, likewise, began his autobiographical epic with ...”

“... had a lot of fun with Ray Dalio, especially with the scene where a down-on-his-luck grandchild of George Leib, the man who gave Dalio his first break, writes asking for a job. Dalio’s immediate reply?If you are qualified for the job, then your resumé should stand on its own. I would not undermine the process of my HR department for anyone.I would not even ...”

“... their share of radicals at the grandes écoles, as they did in prestigious US universities like Berkeley, or Columbia, where the SAS (Students’ Afro-American Society) and the New Left SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) mounted a serious protest in April. It ended with a raw display of police violence. As a US satrapy, Britain was whisked into flower ...”

“... of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, the ‘Terrorists’ (in the French-Revolutionary rather than the George-Bushian sense) have been losing ground in Iran. The Presidencies of Hashemi Rafsanjani were a slow-motion Thermidor. Since Muhammad Khatami was elected President in a landslide in 1997, Iran has stumbled towards accommodation, first with the Arab ...”

“... role in what was supposed to be a French war from an impeccable source – the CIA. George Allen worked on Indochina from 1949 to 1975, by far the longest involvement of any American, a fly on the wall at the decisions of a quarter-century. Allen is a real-life quiet American who saw his job as answering the questions he was asked, without ...”

“... his period, left a lasting manifesto of critical method. He was no provincial, admiring Goethe and George Eliot along with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. But most of what he wrote on literary matters he left unpublished, and his range was essentially French. As a critic, he is remembered today principally for his dismissal of Sainte-Beuve’s aberration in talking ...”

“... at a state dinner in the White House and another time, while she was still First Lady, at one of George Plimpton’s gatherings on the Upper East Side. Now, arriving with his wife for the first party she’d invited him to in her new home, Podhoretz distinguished himself from her obsequious admirers both by his dress and even more emphatically by his ...”

“... secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in ...”

“... crush I had had when I was eighteen. It was a rich and instructive experience.At an event in Berkeley, a man in the audience said there was a passage from the book he wanted to hear me read. During the intervening years, I have had such requests a handful of times, always from men, always involving a passage that turns out to have some kind of sexual ...”

“... Family affairs further deteriorated through my grandmother’s marriage to a man called Dr George Howell, who was a mining engineer and said to be involved in potentially lucrative oil explorations in the Caucasus. Outwardly the model of lower-middle-class respectability, a pillar of Welsh Nonconformity, who played the organ in chapel on ...”