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“... period, the 1967 edition Podhoretz is ‘in with the in-crowd’ (Jackie Kennedy, Lillian Hellman, George Plimpton); he goes where the in-crowd goes, knows what the in-crowd knows. Podhoretz was even invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball of 1966, the party of the century. There could have been no greater confirmation of his having ‘arrived’. In ...”

“... The Merchant of Venice in 1970, he says, Olivier turned up with a hook nose and goatee modelled on George Arliss’s Disraeli and had to be persuaded by his director, Jonathan Miller, to evolve in the succeeding weeks a characterisation based on his own face. No one seems to have told Holden that dress rehearsals normally complete, not commence, the rehearsal ...”

“... were of the Left – Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy (her generous literary executor) and Dwight MacDonald – and she supported, usually with some individual overtone, the advanced causes of the era, from Castro to Vietnam. In the early Sixties she achieved a succès de scandale with her articles (for the New Yorker) on the Eichmann Trial in ...”

“... Johnston dropped out of the cabin, and lay dead on the ground. The van skidded to a halt, and George Stirton – a plain-clothes officer – jumped off, letting fire at the assailants from his own revolver. Within seconds, he was hit on the wrist of his right hand, and dropped the gun. Three shots banged into the van’s radiator, as ...”

“... lectured in Europe. He married four times. He never settled down at a magazine for long, as Dwight Macdonald or Edmund Wilson eventually settled down at the New Yorker, or Howe settled down at his own magazine, Dissent, or Irving Kristol or Norman Podhoretz at theirs. He was never at home anywhere for very long. He was simply never at home. Cook’s biography ...”

“... got out. Because Disraeli was a bona fide imperialist – a believer, like many of those around George Bush, in the principle of Imperium et Libertas – he could demonstrate that he had no goal other than that of freeing the hostages and punishing their captors only by sacking the place where they had been held. The ‘higher principles of humanity’ he ...”

“... strongly critical of some of his appointments, especially of ‘internationalists’ such as George H.W. Bush, James Baker and Caspar Weinberger. Weinberger was one of the few figures in the administration to show concern about white extremism. Reagan only made matters worse by allying himself with Jewish neoconservatives, who his far-right critics ...”

“... but that doesn’t mean it is free from political calculation. As one disgruntled Labour MSP, George Foulkes, complained during the vigorous early days of the SNP’s first government, they are ‘doing it deliberately’. These are state-building manoeuvres, designed to establish the credibility and groundwork for a transition to independence, carried ...”

“... among those who knew him, the puzzle remained: a born writer, but of what? Walker Evans, Dwight Macdonald and Robert Fitzgerald in their memoirs of Agee all describe an enchanting talker and an inspired observer of people. Also of cities, houses, symphonies, books, movies; one who lived hard, drank hard, and knew the force of his own feelings ...”

“... correspondents – right up to the miners’ strike of 1984-85.’ In a fascinating essay about George Woodcock, the TUC General Secretary in the 1960s, Taylor expresses similar feelings about the unions’ inability to establish a relationship with government which would give them a lasting right to joint decision-making. Woodcock, he says, tried in his ...”

“... by Harold Wilson’s government in February 1965. The first request had been made to Ramsay MacDonald’s government sometime between 1929 and 1931. This was refused, as were de Valera’s requests to Stanley Baldwin and Churchill, and Sean Lemass’s request to Harold Macmillan. In her account of the discussions between the two governments about ...”

“... placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning for Paris’, and in September 1939 arrived in Manhattan by Greyhound bus. She enrolled at Columbia, embarking on a doctorate in 17th-century literature but ...”

“... Maugham is Of Human Bondage. It’s easy to see why post-1918 adolescents – including George Orwell – thrilled as the scales fell from the eyes of Philip Carey, the club-footed but otherwise Maugham-like student hero: It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are ...”

“... obsessed with the First World War. Everybody knows Pat Barker, of course, but there’s also Lyn Macdonald – a former BBC producer whose dense, addictive, exhaustively researched oral histories of the war (1914: The Days of Hope, 1915: The Death of Innocence, Somme, They Called It Passchendaele, The Roses of No Man’s Land, To the Last Man: Spring ...”