“... in Germany during the Second World War. But it is a long journey and, after 1050 pages, one may be left wishing it had been slightly shorter. Giovene seems to have put everything in, banal incidents as well as interesting ones, boring people along with some good characters, and he does it all in a style which is often elegant but never humorous. At ...”

“... recordings are programmed to call consumers and question them about their buying habits. These may not get so high a response rate as real living callers: but neither are their feelings hurt when the householder hangs up on them. Time discipline, then, has given us wealth, but as Young warns us, it has also caged us and driven us to the brink, and to ...”

“... the day should not prevent him from dancing at Annabel’s during the night. As an attitude it may be defensible, but it led to a certain amount of mistrust and it contributed to some unreliable journalism. Hitchens in America is recognisably the same creature as he was in Britain, but his range is wider, his writing is more sensitive and his judgments are ...”

“... at their ease; it’s argumentative. Here and there the argument is illuminating, as when David Bomberg’s In the Hold (c.1913-14) is hung next to Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon (1971). Both are busy compositions, with a mass of vigorous figures squeezed closely into a space. But the Bomberg is pretty abstract and is ...”

“... gracious and measured, and why he isn’t that in other settings I don’t know.’ Then again, he may have been played. In the New York Times, Larry David responded to Maher’s account of his cheery time visiting the commander-in-chief with an alternative version: ‘My Dinner with Adolf.’ ‘It wasn’t just a one-way ...”

“... is the story, told in Philip Hoare’s 1995 biography, of Coward’s visit to the Court to see David Storey’s grittily realistic Rugby League play The Changing Room. His attention having been drawn to the male genitalia on display in the bath scene, Coward remarked: ‘13 acorns are not worth the price of admission.’ ‘Not worth the price of ...”

“... so he could talk to the president alone. He told them he had a personal message to convey from David Cameron. In fact, he used the time to pursue some business on behalf of Tony Blair Associates, his commercial calling card. He wanted to sell the Nigerians Israeli drones and other military equipment for use in their fight against Islamic rebels. If true ...”

“... by the American Film Institute to improve the minds of Hollywood hotshots. He was in a class with David Lynch and Paul Schrader.Something in him was set on making movies, though years later he would also adapt the Kenji Mizoguchi film Sansho the Bailiff (1954) for the stage. In addition, and almost to demonstrate his caring and not caring, he wrote an early ...”

“... Other Island), the playwrights listed above wrote about England as if they were English. There may be Irish resonances in Waiting for Godot, but Beckett set it in no man’s land and wrote it in France (and when required to make short trips home to Ireland was subject to depression and illness). Until recently, most great playwrights of Irish origin have ...”

“... the panorama of picture-making is not always alight with understanding or information. The author may have been born on the night in 1933 when his uncle Alexander Korda’s first great success, The Private Life of Henry VIII, opened, and that could have made Michael a good-luck charm in Alex’s eyes. But Michael is neither a film buff nor a historian of the ...”

“... identified, identity and the ability to distinguish between different identities is nothing. This may represent an ideal of Shakespeare’s, who was the father of twins, though of different sex. There is nothing more frustrating for parents than mistaking their own twins. They feel guilty and at the same time awed that they cannot distinguish between two ...”

“... Guiana, and dominates operations like the attempted ‘destabilisation’ of Manley in Jamaica. It may be an MI6 man who is ambassador to Mauritius, close to the Indian Ocean base at Diego Garcia. But the US calls the shots. The British have tried to plug the dyke of disclosures. They exerted heavy pressure on the United States not to let British material ...”

“... Equality can be seen as an indirect attempt to reaffirm its relevance. On the surface its concerns may seem to be different: to establish which parts of Marxism are still defensible and which are not, and to scrutinise the idea of self-ownership that has played a central role in recent libertarian thought, especially in North America. To these tasks Cohen ...”

“... on an island off the Welsh coast. Here writers live in a community paid for by a trust. They may write, they may not. They may find, or they may destroy, themselves. Each is obliged to undertake seven Main Events, a kind of DIY ordeal, under the ...”

“... leveraging their paranoia into real power. Conspiracy theorists are often simply nuts. Ferguson may be a conspiracy theorist as well, but if so he isn’t letting on. In this, his fourth autobiography, he has a chapter about his interests outside football. One of his passions is the Kennedy assassination, to which he has devoted a lot of time and a fair bit ...”