“... Khodorkovsky and another young man coming to him to ask for some start-up capital. They were such nice young men, the professor recalled. He wanted to help them. ‘Well, maybe I forget now,’ the professor told Hoffman. ‘But it seems to me I gave them 170,000 roubles’ – that is, 170,000 roubles from the institute’s notional coffers. This was an ...”

“... Pound’s own life story, the text needs to be glossed in order to be read at all. The annotation Richard Sieburth has provided is ample without being fussy, and his introductory essay offers an informative account of the sequence’s genesis, themes, methods and critical reception (not least from the judges who awarded it the prestigious Bollingen Prize, in ...”

“... Emerson’s poems, Donald Davie’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (‘What piffle!’). Richard Ellmann’s Oxford Book of American Verse, Michael Holroyd’s Augustus John, Andrew Motion’s The Poetry of Edward Thomas (‘Am I to suppose this is how he talks to his students, poor sods?’). The fame of other writers Grigson takes as an ...”

“... Lord Hartwell played the grand old Duke of York. The Deedes/Eastwood duo was essentially a ‘Mr Nice and Mr Nasty’ set-up, and up to a point Deedes was successful in his role. He soothed the bruised egos of journalists treated abominably by Eastwood, and helped to keep the show on the road, so that Telegraph morale didn’t collapse. He also soothed angry ...”

“... They are laughing at the stupidity of the deal we’re making.’ ‘We can’t afford to be so nice and so foolish anymore. Our country is in trouble. Isis is laughing at us.’Veterans Trump: ‘You know something very nice just happened to me. A man came up to me and he handed me his Purple Heart. He said: “That’s ...”

“... On 22 February 1965, the fifth month of Harold Wilson’s first ministry, Richard Crossman recorded the following in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of Anthony Howard. He has just been appointed by the Sunday Times to be the first Whitehall correspondent in history, looking into the secrets of the Civil Service rather than leaking the secrets of the politicians ...”

“... probity with bronze and granite were becoming popular when, with a great piece of salesmanship, Richard Rogers persuaded Lloyd’s to accept a brilliant, unclubbable cousin of the Pompidou Centre for their headquarters. The sense of the passing of architectural time is particularly strong in London now. The Eighties boom found a city of ...”

“... said in the partly autobiographical Discourse, he joined the army to see the world, and, as Richard Watson plausibly enough suggests, to get away from his father and Cartesian family values. The Thirty Years War had just begun, and it was an odd time for someone who so vigorously expressed his love of repose to become a soldier. But if it was a killing ...”

“... kinds of trouble academically and emotionally.’ In a letter to a friend from 1966, reproduced in Richard King’s new oral biography, Travels over Feeling, the 15-year-old Russell is already referring to Walt Whitman, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg (prefiguring later, more explicit involvements with queer sexuality, paganism and utopian politics). There is ...”

“... I was in Los Angeles this spring on the day Richard Feynman died. The next morning I saw a banner lowered from the top of the tower block which stands in the middle of the Caltech campus. It read: ‘WE LOVE YOU DICK.’ The obituary of Feynman in the LA Times was awed and affectionate. It listed his achievements – his work in physics, the Nobel Prize it earned him and his work on the nuclear bomb ...”

“... films were Great Expectations and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Having impressed the composer Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hammerstein) in New York, she was invited to star in The King and I and did so at Drury Lane. Profumo did not immediately gain office when Churchill won the 1951 election, but a year later he became parliamentary undersecretary at the ...”

“... positioning civic corruption in the distant past, the Forties – a period that photographed well, nice hats, frocks, autos, legitimate smoke. Mosley’s country-boy blacks drifted west from Texas looking for jobs in the shipyards (the setting of Chester Himes’s astringent first book, If He Hollers Let Him Go), while Sallis’s transients came south, down ...”

“... in a Monte Carlo hotel, is strictly out of the question. (‘I don’t know what you mean.’) Nice people behave very nicely indeed. The second Mrs de Winter thinks that modesty has ‘something to do with minding meeting people in a passage on the way to the bathroom’. This may be a limited interpretation of one of the great Christian virtues but it is ...”

“... descended on Atkinson. A man from the Daily Express asked her to explain what Post-Modernism was; Richard Hoggart, chairman of the Whitbread judges, said that Atkinson had written a Post-Modern novel, but might not know it. (She did the whole thing absent-mindedly, perhaps, while polishing brass doorknobs.) The Daily Mail sent a woman who found the author ...”

“... a short step to the triple breakthrough of 1595, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet and Richard II. The combination of a learned and allusive style with the indulgent mockery of a schoolmaster who enjoys the friendly patronage of a king proclaim a writer at ease with his own educational capital and the position it may earn him. As it turned ...”