“... Mobutu, probably recruited by Devlin at the end of the 1950s. Mobutu was already in the service of Belgian intelligence and working as a journalist in Brussels. Devlin took a liking to him: he was intelligent, ambitious and charming. More important, Mobutu had met Lumumba in 1959 in Ibadan, at a conference sponsored by the Congress for Cultural ...”

“... recurred every time he seemed ready to go back. In spring 1918 he was about to return to active service when he heard that everyone in his battalion had been killed or taken prisoner at the Chemin des Dames. He went straight back to hospital and was finally discharged in October 1918. ‘He was not malingering,’ Humphrey Carpenter writes in his ...”

“... window, the latest (and no more pleasing than the rest) glimpsed at Paul Scofield’s memorial service in St Margaret’s, Westminster. For all that, though, the book is immensely readable, drawing together so many strands of the artistic life in the 1930s and 1940s – K. Clark, Ben Nicholson, Betjeman and all the stuff to do with the genesis of the Shell ...”

“... wit and humour to protect itself against the failure of its search; and what the art critic Robert Hughes calls (in a different context) a ‘prophylactic irony’ to obscure the poet’s exact attitude to his statements, making his own uncertainty itself uncertain. Such games, and indeed such rigours, are quite unnecessary to a work like Omeros whose ...”

“... to terms with his own sexuality. There are villains: Dr Henderson, Pollock’s Jungian analyst, Robert Motherwell, Clement Greenberg; and heroes and heroines: the sad, remote father, the brothers, particularly Sande, and his wife Arloie, Reuben Kadish, Roger Wilcox, Rita Benton. They write with respect about Lee Krasner and without parti pris. My impression ...”

“... University from 1962 to 1965, before giving up his academic career ‘to devote himself to the service of his people’. In the mid-Sixties he was an aide to George Lincoln Rockwell, editing the American Nazi Party’s magazine, National Socialist World. In late 1967 the ‘American Führer’ (as Rockwell called himself) was assassinated by a disaffected ...”

“... of 21 July 1973, Archer senior served ‘in the Royal Engineers and then in the diplomatic service, and was once British consul in Singapore’. According to the International Herald Tribune of 4 May 1980, he was ‘an army officer who went through the fall of Singapore – “a very clever but physically depleted worn-out man,” Archer ...”

“... reading the newspapers of the time can have something of the same effect, as is well conveyed by Robert Kee’s The World We Left behind. But it’s not the same as a single person’s day-by-day account of – not, of course, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, but – what it eigentlich felt like to that person. The dilemma is whether publication should or ...”

“... escapes Walcott’s rational grip: elsewhere one is too aware of him press-ganging images into the service of an idea. This is especially true of his poems about the United States, which have too many smartly appropriate similes (a New England church spire like a ‘harpoon’, an Appalachian miner’s wife whose neck tendons are ‘taut as banjo ...”

“... minority of the population who are lucky to have supplies provided for them by a publicly financed service.’ So much for the one bright book of life. In addition to his own fieldwork, Mann draws extensively on the statistics which the British book trade and Euromonitor nowadays put out. From Author to Reader provides a handy digest of increased ...”

“... Masood since 1906, further stimulated by news from his friend Malcolm Darling in the Indian Civil Service, and well prepared by extensive reading. Forster went to India in an utterly receptive state of mind and his travels, recorded in a delightful series of long letters to his mother, served mainly to flesh out his ideas with particulars. War work for the ...”

“... to check any strenuous effort’ was a common deterrent to excessive involvement in a career. Robert Mackintosh ‘could continue to solicit from his father’s old friends civil service appointments with titles more impressive than the responsibilities they carried. There was no need for him to concern himself with a ...”

“... career, and on the worlds that shaped its characteristic contours. After teenage wartime service in the American Navy, Geertz went back to school at Antioch College, where he majored in philosophy and English. On graduation, following the advice of Margaret Mead among others, he enrolled for his doctorate at Harvard’s newly-formed, idiosyncratic ...”

“... Honour’ trilogy, as a crusade against the forces of atheism and modernism; he was a bit old for service, but he was courageous, and, even when sober, enthusiastic for the cause. Unfortunately, his fellow officers in the Marines disliked him intensely, and he failed to get promotion. ‘I have become a marionette,’ one of his friends in the Marines ...”

“... American films of the Forties, such as Body and Soul (1947), written by Polonsky and directed by Robert Rossen, or Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), exposed the corrosive effects of a culture devoted to money. The most overtly pro-Soviet films produced in Hollywood, Mission to Moscow (1943), written by Howard Koch, and Song of Russia (1944), written by ...”