“... pieces for the LRB, as an Oxford scholar whose politics were to the left of the editor’s (Karl Miller favoured the SDP, while Johnson favoured Labour). Nowadays I think he’d still say he was on the left but it isn’t obvious what that would mean, in his case especially. Like many people, he prides himself on describing things as they really are.As the ...”

“... George Bush’s proud declaration that by bombing fleeing Iraqi soldiers America had ‘kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all’, was one of the more startling instances from recent years of the Vietnam War’s continuing hold on the American imagination. One could just about suspend disbelief when Sylvester Stallone set about rewriting history, but it was disconcerting to find the President of the United States so clearly in the grip of the same fantasy of revenge ...”

“... and liked to think he had enjoyed a romantic friendship with Princess Charlotte, George IV’s daughter, whose royal blood rendered her inaccessible. They exchanged letters and gifts, but it amounted, we are told, to ‘little more than une amitié amoureuse’. The Duke wept when the Princess died in childbirth, but so did all England. In ...”

“... of Netflix, Amazon and YouTube, there are 700 agents at CAA, but the story told in James Andrew Miller’s riveting book is really about the personalities who invented the game. It is, more particularly, the story of what Michael Ovitz gave to the world and what that world took away from him. It’s Citizen Kane to a disco beat with the moral sophistication ...”

“... rather than Wilde. Geoffrey played Warren, the king’s doctor, in the film The Madness of King George, with Cyril Shaps as Pepys, who set great store by the king’s motions. ‘Oh the stool, the stool,’ said Warren. ‘My dear Pepys. The persistent excellence of the stool has been one of this disease’s most tedious features. When will you get it into ...”

“... from the editor as part-payment. Perhaps contributors to the LRB could work the same trick on Karl Miller, who for this anthology hands over to Nicholas Spice, who in turn sensibly makes sure that Karl Miller’s long essay about the LRB heads the list of contents. This essay is to be relished, not least when it is most ...”

“... the war felt like before the victory of the Allies at El Alamein. In his Levant Journal the poet George Seferis, who was attached to the Greek government in exile in Cairo after Greece had capitulated, recalls grim scenes of panic and disorder as the British, fearing imminent defeat and a German invasion, evacuated thousands of civilians across the border to ...”

“... her, ‘when you decide to be a lady novelist, and get set to write a long novel by Proust out of George Eliot, and it won’t get up and walk.’ The author of The Virgin in the Garden was also 17 in 1953, but Frederica Potter is not A.S. Byatt – even if subsequent novels have shown her giving up the same dissertation (on 17th-century religious ...”

“... any length is the positive tribute, the admiring portrait. It has long been clear, however, that George Orwell is something of a hero of his, as of most political journalists with claims to be both essayists and tellers of unpopular truths, and now, spurred by the appearance four years ago of Peter Davison’s marvellously thorough complete edition of ...”

“... stories he may mean, but wouldn’t that be pretty much tautological? Certainly readers of George V. Higgins and Elmore Leonard would be surprised by the claim as it stands. Binyon also accepts without questioning the distinction between detective fiction and thrillers, or what he sometimes calls adventure stories. This is a familiar distinction, and ...”

“... of 1880, her disappointment at Roderick Hudson had been mitigated by her admiration for ‘Daisy Miller’, and she was glad to be escorted around the city by such a knowledgeable and sympathetic guide: But Florence! here I have attained that old-world feeling I used to dream about, a sort of enthusiasm made up of history, mythology, old ...”

“... a kind of tea-break in the intellectual working day. An objection suggests itself, which is that George Orwell wrote about the ‘English national character’, and Orwell was not a man to write to no purpose. But consider what he wrote – viz. that ‘a profound, almost unconscious patriotism and an inability to think logically are the abiding features of ...”

“... Not quite. Best as I can recall, we started out with Merle Haggard as we climbed along 9 out of St George towards Zion, past scattered groups of houses that looked provisional and out of place in the inhuman landscape: from a distance like lichen and, on closer inspection, like blight. Monk and Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, Nat King Cole (the After Midnight ...”

“... the principal deputy to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. In 2006, George W. Bush appointed him director of the CIA, where he stayed until 2009, when Barack Obama replaced him with Leon Panetta. During Hayden’s ten years at the top, the intelligence establishment assumed many quasi-judicial powers. Domestic ...”

“... course, more trooping to some destinations than others. Stanley Fish, Elaine Showalter or Hillis Miller can fill a ballroom. Other speakers (particularly those consigned to unsocial hours) will address half-empty partitioned areas the size of broom cupboards. Time for all but keynote speakers is strictly rationed – usually to 20 minutes and sometimes ...”