“... actors in my first play, Forty Years On, which was running in the West End. One of the actors was George Fenton, who is doing the music for the film, and another was Keith McNally, the proprietor of Balthazar.15 January. The police officer who shot Mark Duggan is to be returned to firearms duty just as was the officer who shot Jean Charles de Menezes. The Met ...”

“... give himself. He always stopped. He wouldn’t quite go over the top,’ Robert Tear thinks, and Michael Tippett speaks wistfully of Britten’s ‘immense possibilities’. Those possibilities were abundantly evident from the start. The young Britten was a musical prodigy who poured out music in an unstaunchable flood, music which showed him, as a ...”

“... And now, here’s The Pale King, this book-shaped version of the ‘long thing’, assembled by Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor on Infinite Jest, from ‘a neat stack of manuscript, 12 chapters totalling nearly 250 pages’ discovered by Wallace’s agent on the desk in his home office, augmented by a selection from ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of less ...”

“... offers a frightening gallery of rogue vents – from Eric von Stroheim in The Great Gabbo to Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night and Anthony Hopkins in Magic – who have been led astray by their dummy-selves; and real vents can be just as mixed up as fictional ones. When the English entertainer Arthur Prince died in 1948, his jolly partner Jim was ...”

“... and animating relationship between the English and their past (his friendship in the 1930s with Michael Oakeshott may have played a part here): ‘Let us praise as a living thing the continuity of our history, and praise the whigs who taught us that we must nurse this blessing – reconciling continuity with change, discovering mediations between past and ...”

“... the war. Had she joined the Forces, she might have escaped what one of her disenchanted courtiers, George Urban, called her ‘Alf Garnett’ view of Germany. As of Hitler, Margaret Thatcher knew exactly what she thought of the European Community. She did not like international organisations as such. She disliked the United Nations and the Commonwealth, and ...”

“... accusations of perversity, hostility and just plain bad intentions. A kinder, gentler unconscious, George Bush might say. Jung could never quite match Freud as a literary persona, but then who can? Jung’s forte was rather his therapeutic attitude. Much of what he had to say about treatment was both humane and wise, very much to be preferred to the ...”

“... all this immensely but, of course, I couldn’t help knowing that it wasn’t all a dream, as in a George Landow film, from which the audience would awake with a jolt at the end of the last reel. I felt that it wasn’t enough to say it was all over now, that Atlantis had finally sunk beneath the sea, carrying with it a utopia which, as Hoberman ...”

“... correspondents – right up to the miners’ strike of 1984-85.’ In a fascinating essay about George Woodcock, the TUC General Secretary in the 1960s, Taylor expresses similar feelings about the unions’ inability to establish a relationship with government which would give them a lasting right to joint decision-making. Woodcock, he says, tried in his ...”

“... prodigy’ – precisely the sort of instinctive apprehension that was lost on someone like George Bernard Shaw, who, equipped as he was with an all-encompassing theory of the world, ‘has all the time been silently comparing humanity with something that was not human’. Shaw was typical of the heresy of sterile intellectualism: ‘all aversions to ...”

“... for the Isle of Dogs, that unlucky swamp, were shredded for the construction of a shelf of towers. Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired, mad-eyed visionary (Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatcher’s Werner Herzog), pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula, Bugsby’s Marshes. The obsessive, neurotic and delusional Millennium Dome concept was ...”

“... Gorbachev replied: ‘We can do that. We can eliminate them.’ Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, sitting in on the conversation, couldn’t hold his tongue. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said. The implications of this sudden meeting of minds were, as one observer put it, ‘cosmic’. Within a matter of moments, the future prospects of the human ...”

“... you will hit a stalled car. The car has only one occupant, but it is Saul Bellow, or Madonna, or Michael Jordan, or Margaret Thatcher. What do you do? I submit that if you are seeking counsel at a crucial moment of decision the last person you want to turn to is someone who spends his time thinking up hypotheticals like this one so that he can amaze students ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Bushnell, Sex and the City’s creator and its second lead writer were gay men, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, prompting one of the Girls cast, Jemima Kirke, to say of Dunham’s series: ‘It’s not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended ...”