“... booked in the Latin Quarter. ‘For security reasons,’ the message ran, ‘the meetings will be held at the home of Michel Foucault.’ I was duly provided with an address, and at ten the next morning I arrived at Foucault’s apartment to find a number of people – but not Sartre – already milling around. No one was ever to explain the mysterious ...”

“... alongside Tolkien (MSI activists had set up a Camp Hobbit in 1977). The festival continues to be held, featuring international stars of the far right from Steve Bannon to Viktor Orbán and inevitably – or so it feels nowadays – Elon Musk. By 2004 Meloni had been elected president of the AN’s youth wing, the first woman to lead any such political ...”

“... between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground of its subject very ably and maintains a ...”

“... his own. His mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, later published stories in the magazine and his son David would also find a path into the fiction section. Having secured a berth in the upper echelon of eminence, Updike never forgot to acknowledge the ancestral tribe of authors, editors and cartoonists who came before – Peter Arno, Charles Addams, John ...”

“... into my barn’ (Matthew 13, 30). Religious language with a different resonance is deployed by David Halperin in his Saint Foucault, which bears the subtitle ‘Towards a Gay Hagiography’. Halperin is well aware of the dangerous echo of Saint Genet, Sartre’s overbearing and invasive gloss on another writer’s life and work, but appropriates another ...”

“... some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening paper men, to cover unexpected news of the day … a big fire, strike … railway accidents, pit accidents, or any other major catastrophes in which the public, I fear, is deeply interested.’ Two years later, on 30 ...”

“... of me returns a powerful echo to Adorno’s ideal of concentrated listening. When my attention is held by music, I achieve a state of mental and physical equilibrium which no other experience gives me, except perhaps the experience of silence, and I sometimes think of music as a species of silence. I was recently struck by this relationship of music to ...”

“... quickly, and aloud.’ (The faux-solicitous note recalls one of his best jokes, in a review of David Lodge’s Working with Structuralism: ‘His title,’ Carey said, ‘has a making-the-best-of-it ring, rather like “Surviving with Sciatica”.’) Based on this account, there is not much doubt where his own preference in the 20th century lies and it is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Patten among them, and possibly by design; but, surveying the cards that Britain and China held at that time, no one has specified how they could have done any better. That master of the slogan, Deng Xiaoping, compressed his offer to Hong Kong into 20 Chinese characters, or three principles: maintaining prosperity; Hong Kong people running Hong ...”

“... coffee plantations, and a handful threw in their lot with the FNLA. But the ethnic strains, which David Birmingham describes very well in his new history of Angola, were too great for this arrangement to last: in 1966 Jonas Savimbi, an ambitious and volatile character, left the FNLA to embark on a venture of his own, Unita (União Nacional para a ...”

“... French and not knowing anybody there, and before long was the king of dressmakers. Each season he held court, showing several designs in his atelier (on live models!) to select clients, who would choose their outfits and be measured up inhouse. Empress Eugénie, his foremost patron, was still waited on at the Elysée (until the Second Empire fell and she went ...”

“... show through. So he writes after the death of the poet Charles Sorley that ‘a black depression held me,’ as though depression needs to be represented as a force outside himself; and when he predicts his own breakdown he sees it as an external force which turns him into an object he can see from the outside: ‘It would be a general nervous collapse, with ...”

“... by giving him an extra share from her own rations.Despite all the evidence, it was still a widely held belief that sufferers brought TB on themselves. Wilhelm Stekel, who treated Brandt in Vienna, maintained that ‘the psychic component plays a formidable part in tuberculosis. Many people become ill because they are tired of life and have a wish to ...”