“... savage passes through Tahiti, from Rousseau by way of Banks and the besotted crew of HMS Bounty to Paul Gauguin.And there were much gossiped about passages of dodgy behaviour on home soil. Departing on the voyage to the South Seas, Banks left behind a young lady, Harriet Blosset, so convinced he had made a promise to marry that she spent three years knitting ...”

“... and shown by Arte, a Franco-German public television channel. At the eleventh hour, Browder hired Carter-Ruck, the well-known London libel lawyers, to send legal letters to the European Parliament and every organisation involved in making and distributing the film. The screening was cancelled and Nekrasov’s film never found a distributor. When I wrote to ...”

“... Worst Restaurant In America’ he fired off an early morning tweet directed at its editor, Graydon Carter, who not coincidentally had been co-editor of Spy. ‘Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of Vanity Fair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!’ Immediately, Vanity Fair ...”

“... a finer nuance of meaning. In their excellent compilation, The Jew in the Modern World (1980), Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz point out that the term’s origin is theological. More specifically, it ‘derives from the Septuagint, the Jewish translation of the Hebrew Scripture into Greek from the third century BC, in which holokaustos (“totally ...”

“... by 25 per cent. The situation was defused by a brilliant and near-treasonous intervention by Jimmy Carter, who negotiated a compromise face to face with Kim Il Sung and then bounced the administration into accepting it by announcing it live from Pyongyang on CNN. The result was the Agreed Framework, an elaborately programmed sequence of reciprocal steps under ...”

“... At a memorial service marking the fiftieth anniversary of Chesterton’s death, Cardinal Emmett Carter described him as one of the ‘holy lay persons’ who have exercised a prophetic role within the Church and the world. Though the cardinal was hesitant, the Chesterton Review wondered whether there might be grounds for canonisation, given the ‘special ...”

“... thought about this for some time but my thoughts were focused when I saw Isabelle Huppert in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 film, Elle. The film begins with a rape about which the victim, Huppert, is ambivalent. This sent the critics, particularly male critics, scuttling to and fro wondering whether it was a feminist, post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or ...”

“... a story in Evening in Paradise called ‘Andado: A Gothic Romance’. It is set up like an Angela Carter tale. A new bride is shown to her bedroom, and the bridegroom lays a hairy paw on her breast before disappearing to dress for dinner. ‘This would never happen to her again. When she grew older she would always be in control, even when being ...”

“... ever. Here was an unambiguous riposte to the Japanese economic miracle, that Pearl Harbour of the Carter era. Excellence didn’t need to be imported from over the Pacific. Drawing on their experience as consultants with McKinsey and Company, Peters and Waterman Junior insisted that it was a native quality of American enterprise. Peters and Waterman Junior ...”

“... ruins, the exploration of geographical and social wastelands. Some, following in the footsteps of Paul Theroux’s Kingdom by the Sea, see the Northern towns as horrors. Others, indignant at the haemorrhage of jobs and skills, chart the progress of disindustrialisation. Ian Jack’s Before the Oil Ran Out and Robert Chesshyre’s The Return of a Native ...”

“... legalism. An important clue to this aspect of her thinking is the approval with which she cites Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, two unilateralist hawks associated with the current Bush Administration. During the 1990s, they both urged US military intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo outside the framework of the UN and contrary to its Charter. Power thinks ...”

“... reactors at Yongbyon, about sixty miles north of Pyongyang. Then, at the last minute, Jimmy Carter got North Korea to agree to a complete freeze on activity at the Yongbyon complex, and a Framework Agreement was signed in October 1994. The Republican Right railed against this for the next six years, until George W. Bush brought a host of the ...”

“... bombs on students ‘returning home at night in evening dress’), was the ‘little band’ of Paul Nizan, René Maheu and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was rumoured to be ‘the worst of the lot’.Beauvoir was preparing for her exams, full of love for Zaza, constantly addressing herself in her diary to the absent Jacques ...”

“... Japan. There, the building that kicked off Brutalism was the Yale Art and Architecture Building by Paul Rudolph, a sculptural, self-conscious monument lined in ‘corduroy concrete’. The ethic, here, was wholly architectural – a ‘truth to materials’, an ‘expression of structure’ and, especially, an expression of the building’s technical ...”

“... luscious, spittle-ridden German), Cuban contredanses, Planet Squeezebox, some croaky old Carter Family, Morton Feldman, Beatrice Lillie (and fairies at the bottom of the garden), Elmore James, Giulio Cesare, Miss Kitty Wells, Vespro della beata vergine, South Pacific, Pet Sounds, Les Négresses Vertes, Dusty in Memphis, Ferrier’s ...”