“... of it being a first night as that the cast have been doing it on and off now for two years. When James C. drops his head on his desk it’s with an almighty crash and he gets up looking a bit pale, but there are no other slip-ups. The response at the end is tumultuous, the audience (though I think this is nowadays obligatory) rising to their feet en ...”

“... the Mail. It was first put on in 1980, and while generally enthusiastic the Mail assumes, as did James Fenton at the time of the first production, that by putting the main young man in drag I am signalling my own (presumably suppressed) desire to get into a frock. It may be that the Mail assumes all homosexuals would like to be in skirts (or ought to ...”

“... Africa’s freedom from apartheid is ‘incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians’. James Baldwin sought to profane what he termed a ‘pious silence’ around Israel’s behaviour when he claimed that the Jewish state, which sold arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa, embodied white supremacy not democracy. Muhammad Ali saw Palestine as ...”

“... Crockatt and Powell on Lower Marsh, a street opposite The Cut near the Old Vic, where I buy Henry James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master’. It’s a short story in which Henry St George, a famous novelist, supposedly Daudet but resembling James himself, gives the benefit of his experience to a young writer, Paul Overt. St ...”

“... to ways of dealing with Britain’s rubbish. ‘Everything is checked,’ she says. Her colleague Peter Robinson chips in. ‘The whole area of waste handling and management is so much more technically sound in the UK than it ever was before.’ He smiles. ‘This country’s history of landfill has actually been quite safe; it has served us well.’ On the ...”

“... the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.’ As adjutant to Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to ...”

“... the actor is the same, Rudolf Klein-Rogge.By 1933 Lang had made his first sound film, M, with Peter Lorre as the child murderer who is caught and tried by criminals rather than cops: the trouble he is causing is bad for business, and the criminals are also full of moral indignation. The film’s original title was Murderer among Us, and the story goes ...”

“... we normalised this inherently exploitative behaviour.’In​ the postwar period, landlords from Peter Rachman – whose name became a byword for racketeering and exploitation in the 1950s – to Rigsby in the 1970s sitcom Rising Damp, were seen in the popular cultural imagination as mean, unscrupulous and cowardly. By the time Thatcher came to power 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 ...”

“... who have done the best work on her project have been former students, including Howard Caygill and Peter Osborne, who together now teach at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. (Gilroy too was Rose’s student before he moved to Stuart Hall in Birmingham. She was a ‘great’ teacher, he has said, and he followed her ...”

“... rather more than two hundred years after Pope, the distinguished editor of the Twickenham Dunciad, James Sutherland, declined to take the poet at his word, and added a note on the annotation explaining that the name ‘really was pronounced’ Theobald. Presumably following this lead, an equally distinguished Popian, Maynard Mack, has now in his long-awaited ...”

“... mainstream novel has been a woman, not a man. (It takes a specialised genre, like fantasy of the James Bond type, or Science Fiction, actively to posit a male reader; perhaps that is why Amis is interested in both.) The classic field of novels, domestic life and its relationships, used to be described as a microcosm of the greater world, but of course it ...”

“... Institute of the Market with backing from the neo-liberal Institute of Economic Affairs in London; Peter Aven, who had worked for some time in Vienna; Boris Feodorov, who had recently taken up a job with the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Many of these men knew each other well: Kagalovsky, an inveterate networker, arranged ...”

“... let’s have us honey –‘It set the prosodic pattern,’ Berryman told the interviewer, Peter Stitt, who had been a student of his a few years earlier. The interview was conducted in a ward in St Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis, where Berryman seemed to be comfortable. He spent quite a bit of time there during the last few years of his life. In ...”

“... it ‘rather dreary’. The following year, when Another Country appeared, he made his position on James Baldwin clear: ‘I loathe Jimmy’s fiction: it is crudely written and of a balls-aching boredom.’ In 1960 he found something he did like. He announced to David Selznick that ‘a delightful book’ called To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was ‘going ...”