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“... mistress of General John Pershing and had helped break up the marriage of the British admiral Sir David Beattie. She was introduced to the glamorous young Superintendent. It was, in Perret’s view, a case of mutual and instantaneous lust. Others diagnosed the meshing of public images. The New York Times report of their wedding, on St Valentine’s Day ...”

“... making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working’ – from an article by David Graeber for Strike! magazine about ‘bullshit jobs’. Productive jobs, he argues, have been automated away and replaced by administrative ones which masquerade as service: HR, PR, financial services, ancillary industries like dog-washing and all-night ...”

“... did not know that Franco would die in November. I did not know, nor did anybody else, that the new king was a democrat and took the view that democracy should not be introduced slowly but in one fell swoop. I did not know that within a year of Franco’s death the names of the streets in the old city would be put up in Catalan, the language he had banned, that ...”

“... has written: ‘he wrested his idiom bare-handed out of a literary nowhere.’ ‘I am king,’ wrote Kavanagh of himself in a beautiful poem, ‘Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.’ ‘Peasant poet’ will look derogatory to some, and it is as well to add that the peasant’s nowhere and nothing hardly characterise the work of ...”

“... Come-On’ and ‘Remembering Lunch’. ‘The Come-On’ takes its epigraph from Camus: ‘The king’s son who kept watch over the gates of the garden in which I wanted to live’. It does not take the class war quite seriously, and that makes it the more effectively disconcerting. Can I become the king’s son? But ...”

“... Portobello Car and Van Hire. 10 March. To Bradford for the provincial premiere of The Madness of King George. The Lord Mayor is present and R. sees him afterwards in the Gents, mayoral chain round his neck, trying to have a pee. His badge of office dangles just over his flies so that he has to take great care not to piss on it. Eventually he slings it back ...”

“... the operation that remained, there was almost no first-hand reporting. One freelance journalist, David Divine, made three trips in a small boat that was rescuing British troops, and the Royal Navy took a Pathé newsreel reporter-cum-cameraman; otherwise the BBC (and British newspapers) relied on the Ministry of Information. The consequences were a mixture of ...”

“... life of crime, since he can perish and still live – like a monarchy rather than an individual king or queen. In Lang’s film we see him dead, but the doctor who is his passionate admirer takes over. He not only continues Mabuse’s criminal enterprises but finally, after a few more murders, some spectacular fireworks at a chemical factory and an ...”

“... but deceived by sycophantic underlings: if only Kennedy – or Johnson, Nixon, the Pope, the King, the Tsar, Stalin etc – had known what was going on, he would have fixed things. Ellsberg calls this the standard ‘quagmire school’ approach to the Vietnam War, led by people like David Halberstam and Arthur ...”

“... spent roughly 35 weeks a year away from our parents, not that I was complaining. In exchange for a king’s ransom, which mine struggled to raise, I was educated and boarded at Wellington College, a boys-only private school in Berkshire. Sandhurst still took a tranche of sixth-formers from the school, with grants from the Ministry of Defence covering the ...”

“... it was received with rapture by a wide swathe of the establishment. Marcel Gauchet, intellectual king of the French liberals, declared it ‘compulsory reading for all political leaders’. Macron called it ‘a perfect description of Africa’s demographic time bomb’ and Smith received a prize from the foreign minister. Alain Finkielkraut, doyen of ...”

“... of English literature who can successfully help students navigate their encounter with, say, King Lear, but hardly any of those teachers will be able to produce an extended critical analysis of the play that could come close to matching some of the magnificent readings offered by a handful of major critics in the past. Nonetheless, the current form of ...”

“... then, that the two finest biographies of Fanon have been written by an Englishman and an American. David Macey’s Frantz Fanon: A Biography was published in 2000: it is the kind of book that has always (justifiably) attracted the epithet ‘magisterial’. Macey’s account is now joined by The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz: necessarily a more ...”

“... like the pockets of comic relief in Shakespearean tragedy. It is far larger and more defining. In David Hawkes’s translation of The Dream, an achievement surpassing Scott Moncrieff’s or later English versions of Proust in the art of delivering one cultural world – a much stranger one – into another, not only is the wit no barrier to an Anglophone ...”

“... his presciently titled book (Bush had not yet loosed his thunderbolt when the MS was completed), David Victor of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, calls it ‘the Kyoto fantasyland’, and in retrospect there was never a chance of a workable agreement. But the Kyoto delegates believed they had two precedents to hearten them. In 1985 Joe ...”