“... was also the unbalanced and paranoid Rousseau whose writings about himself must be disregarded: Paul de Man has suggested that modern critics have fulfilled Rousseau’s fantasies about persecution. There were, in fact, many of his contemporaries who also wished him harm, such as Grimm, Voltaire, Diderot, d’Holbach and various former associates. Rousseau ...”

“... Sir Paul Marshall​ ’s emergence as a right-wing media tycoon has been rapid. A decade ago he was a Lib Dem donor; now he owns the house journal of the Conservative Party. Immediately after he bought the Spectator for an inflated £100 million last September, its chairman, Andrew Neil, resigned, signing off with a barbed tweet about editorial independence ...”

“... her valiant attempt to bring a bohemian spirit to a corporate building. With the help of Philip Johnson, MoMA’s first architecture curator, who had recently set up his own practice, Lambert spent six weeks travelling around America interviewing the most prominent practitioners of the International Style. She divided them into three categories: those who ...”

“... a section called ‘Biographical Notes’, should make the first entry read, ‘1905 21 June: Jean-Paul Sartre born in Paris’, and the last: ‘1980: Death of Sartre’. There are those for whom Simone de Beauvoir is important only because of her association with Sartre. Her four volumes of autobiography are sometimes seen merely as useful source material ...”

“... to truth and their authority to realise the consequent technologies? The Berkeley anthropologist Paul Rabinow has been describing modernity and its truth-speakers for many years now. His first subjects were a group of religious leaders in post-colonial Morocco, and Symbolic Domination (1975) was an account of the complex interplay between rural tradition and ...”

“... knew Sanskrit and could rapidly mug up almost any other language he wanted (chatting away to Paul Kruger in Afrikaans, for example). As a child brought up by a single parent without any of the advantages of aristocratic descent or a wider family network, he embraced wholeheartedly and romantically all the institutions of the establishment, and they in ...”

“... and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty Boothroyd. Papers aren’t just papers any longer. A lot of these ...”

“... When Captain Paul Voulet presented his plan for a new expedition to the minister of colonies in January 1898 he was accorded a good reception. He was, after all, a promising young officer whose previous mission to French Sudan had shown exemplary firmness towards the natives, and only a few months earlier the president of the republic, Félix Faure, had given him an audience ...”

“... peace in the early hours of the morning while playing a drunken game of bicycle polo with Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. He insisted that behaving this way was his birthright and that he had merely been entertaining those he had woken up. What made all the difference was war and the Guards. All four joined up, keen to do their duty but also to see action; the ...”

“... away his funds in Liechtenstein – was found hanging from a London bridge. For a long time only Paul Foot in Private Eye had the temerity to question Maudling’s honesty. Mainstream editors and journalists were decidedly protective of him and, as Baston notes, there was a continuous establishment cover-up. Those investigating the string of scandals and ...”

“... Lafite du Languedoc’; others have been praised to the heights by the likes of Hugh Johnson and Robert Parker. The wine is now on the list at the Tour d’Argent and the 1986 vintage retails at the vineyard for £65 a bottle. The sole shadow on the lives of these millionaires is cast by the odd hailstorm. No one to whom I have begun recounting ...”

“... borders closed.The government appears to support the argument put forward in Alexander Betts and Paul Collier’s book Refuge (reviewed by Daniel Trilling in the LRB of 13 July 2017) that asylum seekers who come to Europe rather than staying in a country close to their own are not refugees but economic migrants. This doesn’t accord with the terms of the UN ...”

“... Dylan Thomas poems, however, is well beyond the competence of other stars in the firmament, even Paul McCartney. There have been various, normally embarrassing attempts by rock groups, or ex-members of rock groups going solo, to explore musical ‘concepts’ and create ‘avant-garde’ albums, but Cale moved in the other direction, from the world of La ...”

“... Dryden’s as much as Romantic ‘imagination’ differed from Augustan ‘wit’. But here is Dr Johnson: ‘to write con amore … was … no part of his character.’ Verse starved of parental love may well have problems attracting affection later. T.S. Eliot took a charitable interest in the case in 1921, but his contribution is rather reminiscent of Mr ...”

“... her lover Gilbert Imlay, first published by Godwin among her posthumous works, and then by Kegan Paul in 1879. Ingpen wrote of her life and sufferings tenderly: ‘Pathetic and lonely, she stands out in the faint mists of the past, a woman that will continue to evoke sympathy when her books are no longer read.’ Evidently he had no doubt of their ceasing to ...”