“... to ‘easy superiority of tone’ but to a sourness, and a snootiness too. He goes back to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, which he had once ‘mildly ridiculed’ in a TV book programme (‘the usual line about laundry lists, Somerset Maugham’s shoelaces, and the like’), and half-expects an unfriendly reception. But he doesn’t get one, and ...”

“... the papacy threatened to escalate into armed conflict. After his election as pope in May 1605, Paul V sought to overturn restrictions on church-building and the unlicensed transfer of properties to the Church, while also seeking to deny the republic’s right to try clergy indicted on criminal charges in secular courts. The Venetians resisted, resulting in ...”

“... dialogue; or as Weight puts it in the first subheading of his introduction: ‘Amphetamines, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker’. Which is a nice phrase, even if it’s half-inched from an interviewee in a previous book, Jonathon Green’s flawless oral history of 1960s counterculture, Days in the Life. (In fact Green also used it as a subheading. This ...”

“... or borrowing as the case might be. When The Closing of the American Mind first came out, Robert Paul Wolff, then a professor of philosophy at Amherst, wrote a short review in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. Let me quote from his prescient opening staves: Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned to ...”

“... architecture between the wars was largely a literary construct. A physical building was, as Harry Goodhart-Rendel drily remarked, merely ‘an unfortunate but necessary step’ between the architect’s perspective drawing and the ultimate photograph. When it came to photographing the Hunstanton school for the architectural press Smithson removed every ...”

“... included movie stars, screenwriters and directors, not all of them Jewish. Supporters included Harry and Jack Warner, who broadcast the league’s shows on their radio stations. A Popular Front organisation, as well as an early example of movie-star politics, the league was the subject of a 1938 Congressional investigation before it disintegrated in ...”

“... Keith and Mick. Like brothers. Like evil sisters in disguise. A two-headed beast. The opposite of Paul and John. The dark and the light. I’ve always been pulled toward darkness. Toward black. Toward death. Toward the South. Good. Now I’m heading the right direction. Away from the quaint North. Away from lobsters and white churches and Civil War graveyards ...”

“... PWAs (persons with Aids). Politically, the community has also come of age: in a recent election, Harry Brit, Milk’s successor as the gay representative at City Hall, was defeated by a woman candidate, Norma Polisario, because for the first time since Milk’s campaign in the Seventies the gay and lesbian communities had ceased to vote en ...”

“... the Democratic and Republican leaders of Congress, Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, as well as every lawmaker closely associated with ‘intelligence oversight’ of the War on Terror: Dianne Feinstein, Mike Rogers, Lindsey Graham – here, once again, cutting across party lines. Those who praised Snowden’s action and (in some ...”

“... the high ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Mansfield was a friend of the late Harry Jaffa, the leader of the Californian sect, who is best known outside Straussian circles for the spectacularly misfiring line he gave Barry Goldwater during a stint as his speechwriter in 1964: ‘Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice.’ Mansfield ...”

“... been supplanted at number one by the, it turns out, even more eagerly awaited new book about Harry Potter. Actually, Potter is eating Lecter alive and, at the time of writing, his adventures are at numbers one, two and three in the Amazon.co.uk bestseller list. The first two books have, broadly speaking, the same plot, except that in Red Dragon Lecter ...”

“... Like many other plutocrats who are now remembered as great collectors, J. Paul Getty began acquiring works of art in a serious way when he began to die – that is to say, in his forties (he was born in 1892), which is when most of us start thinking up ways of not thinking about mortality. He bought glamorous pieces of French furniture and decorative art, a field in which it is relatively easy to buy reliable advice ...”

“... cars.’ Note the ‘we’. By her own analysis, Gordimer has always been a legitimate target. Paul Bannerman, the central character in Get a Life, is a campaigning ecologist who, when the novel opens, is suffering from cancer. His treatment has left him radioactive and only his parents, regardless of the danger to their own health, are capable of the ...”

“... then my father, Philip, called Phil but Phishel at home, from his Hebrew name, Feisal; then Jack, Harry, Sid, Dave and Louis. Their father was a tailor, one who earned too little, with all those mouths to feed, to be able to buy shoes for his children to wear to school. At 13 or 14 my father got a job in a billiard hall, and thereby became a useful ...”

“... right in front of me at the next table, facing half away but unmistakeable, in full colour, sits Paul Funge. It is some years since I have seen him, and this is not the right time, and he knows that too, but we are old friends and we are both alone at lunchtime and he knows and I know that I must join him at his table. The painting I bought from him more ...”