“... symbols where none intended’? Does this mean that there are no symbols or that there are (or may be) symbols only where unintended? Given the active complicity of biography (as of psychoanalysis) in the tendency to regard sexual disclosure as the sine qua non of candour (perhaps what Knowlson obscurely hints at when in the Preface he says that his book ...”

“... a lot of that himself – than for the way old formal utterances have been strangely preserved and may be used in all innocence. By his original sure instinct, fine ear, and the formidable scholarship with which he later reinforced them, Humphries identified the pristine quality of everyday Australian English, a language which the self-consciousness of a ...”

“... almost powerless by the actions of distant states, such as North Vietnam, Iran and Israel (and may well now be adversely affected by events in certain of the smaller Latin American states). Naturally this gloomy account can be contested. Every President since Truman can be presented in a more favourable light, and it can be argued that historians should ...”

“... and her question was the same as her brother’s, and asked in the same low, grave tones: ‘Where may I hire a thief?’ The story of the rich idiot who had come looking for a burglar was already common knowledge in those insalubrious gullies, but this time the girl added: ‘I should say that I am carrying no money, nor am I wearing any jewels; my father has ...”

“... and, in all probability, the political editor Adam Raphael. If he hasn’t sacked them yet, it may only be because he finds himself strapped in by the conditions attached to the sale of the paper. But Rowland is a very determined character – as is shown by his relentless fight with the House of Fraser over the future of Harrods. He is the kind of man ...”

“... as the conditionings we undergo from our myths of identity’. The phrasing there (as elsewhere) may borrow from religion but the meaning is entirely psychological and personal and turns on Heaney’s growing conviction that communal consciousness is a kind of false consciousness: ‘The real problem in Northern Ireland’, he told Miller, ‘is that the ...”

“... with the sentiment, but the question is how to define ‘we’. Employees of the New York Times may be ready to own up to shameful jokes they made as undergraduates, but that does not stop right-wing operatives combing through their social media trails in an attempt to get them fired. A general amnesty for having once been an asshole doesn’t seem to be on ...”

“... of the world”’. One reason Fitzgerald continues to fascinate generations of US teenagers may indeed be the way his most popular book upholds the American dream, its ‘colossal vitality’, even as it exposes it. But even old friends like Wilson never quite appreciated the depth of Fitzgerald’s disillusionment, the nihilism behind the ...”

“... and greeted Henry Kissinger with bear hugs and heavy jokes. When the president came to Moscow in May 1974, he found Brezhnev ‘like a big Irish labour boss’, backslapping at one moment and at the next bellowing with anger (for the benefit of listeners in Hanoi) about the Vietnam War. Here and at Camp David, Nixon was a terrified witness to Brezhnev’s ...”

“... being himself. As he explained to a friend: ‘If it were not for great self-management, and what may be called a strict intellectual regimen, I should very soon be in a deplorable state of what is called nervous disease.’ Thomas Carlyle, whose own nerves had their deplorable moments, knew a fraught hidden drama when he saw one: ‘How has this man ...”

“... by his white thobe, Ahmad exuded energy and an air of confidence even though what he is doing may land him in jail. He was on the phone talking urgently to another member of a newly formed committee to help detainees in Qatif. ‘Do I tell him to surrender himself to the police or not? Five men went in yesterday and they haven’t been heard from ...”

“... are today elegant, pleasant, quiet places to live; Robin Hood Gardens, however controversial it may still be, is indisputably preferable to the serried yuppiedromes being prepared for the site; and buildings by both from the 1970s have been listed. Their strange, disguised self-flagellation appears wholly unjustified. Their guide, though it seldom revises ...”

“... Sudanese brothers who had been released from Guantánamo called me: ‘Come, come!’ In April or May, I took a small bag, the court papers saying I was innocent and a few clothes. I gave all the rest to friends. I thought I’d never go back to Chad. In Darfur, I found a space in a lorries convoy to Khartoum. Each lorry had maybe fifteen persons on the ...”

“... the importance of morality regularly betray his friends and his cause for so many years? Money may have changed hands, but this is not, in Silone’s case, sufficient explanation. All his biographers agree that, in so far as an answer is to be had, it must lie in the aftermath of the earthquake that struck central Italy in 1915. The third child of small ...”

“... bureaucrats, surely one of the least romanticisable social groupings imaginable on this earth. He may also have liked the element of self-mortification involved in this choice, or perhaps it was the challenge he found exciting: ‘To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human,’ he has a nameless character say at one ...”