“... such an event.A less well-known but more interesting scam than any of these was pulled off by Dr John Ackah Blay-Miezah, who persuaded investors across Ghana and the US that he was the sole beneficiary of a $27 billion trust fund hidden away in Swiss bank accounts by Kwame Nkrumah. He explained that as the former Ghanaian president’s closest confidant, he ...”

“... exhibition Mellor got in touch with her daughter, Boty Goodwin, who was then in her twenties. She took him to the family home in Kent and he saw a cache of her mother’s paintings, which transformed his ideas: ‘Suddenly the whole history of British Pop Art was different.’Well, yes and no. As Marc Kristal suggests in the introduction to his widely ...”

“... devotees to complain that Americans have got him all wrong. As early as 1897, the radical John Jay Chapman presented him as a fellow iconoclast who had been miscast as an apologist for American selfishness, ‘embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved’. The tendency of biographers to make their own Emersons means that some academics dislike the ...”

“... making a dissonant off-beat one-two of female distress. The woman put her hand on her chest and took a breath. ‘Jesus! I’m sorry,’ Iona said. ‘You startled me. I thought I was on my own. I’m Iona.’ ‘Nousche,’ said the woman, who had the trace of an accent – French? Italian? That must be her name: Nousche. She was wearing a light, filmy top ...”

“... the Ridley camp to claim that their man was misquoted or that any breach of professional ethics took place. Not only is this the sort of thing he says: he must have supposed that it was opportune, or at least safe, to say it while the tape-recorder rolled. This is what immediately made Dominic Lawson’s ears prick up. ‘The point is,’ he rightly ...”

“... US Army expression, and most of my former colleagues in his book Good Times, Bad Times’), so he took his redundancy money and settled for writing books. His autobiographical Growing up in London was followed by Growing up on the ‘Times’ which concentrated on his overseas assignments. Both were vivid and zestful memoirs. Memories of Times Past is an odd ...”

“... venereal diseases, became the Führer’s personal doctor at Christmas 1936. The elevation, which took place during a visit to Hitler’s retreat on the Obersalzberg, was greeted by Morell’s wife with the oracular words: ‘What do we need with that!’ – a rendering, presumably, of ‘Wozu brauchen wir das?’ The diaries begin in July 1941, a few weeks ...”

“... it was Chamberlain, breaking with old orthodoxies, who sought to achieve through tariff reform Sir John Seeley’s vision of a Greater Britain equipped for the struggles of the 20th century. Many efforts have been made to interpret Chamberlain and the great U-turn he performed in mid-career. Inevitably, the supporters of Mr Gladstone regarded him as a traitor ...”

“... given to jokes, even if his poems are often wry:As I sd to myfriend, because I amalways talking, John, Isd, which was not hisname, the darkness sur-rounds us, whatcan we do againstit or else, shall wewhy not, buy a goddamn big car,drive, he sd, forchrist’s sake, lookout where yr going.‘I Know a Man’ was included in Creeley’s first major ...”

“... he cannot continue his roll call of Gregory’s friends because ‘a thought/Of that late death took all my heart for speech.’ We may grant Yeats command of that trick and also say that to confront horror with irony calls for the powers of a Swift. Neither of these devices was available to Amis, unless one were to argue that there is, within his ...”

“... isn’t convinced by the case for voting for a lesser evil. ‘The suffering’, Noam Chomsky and John Halle wrote in June, that Trump’s ‘extremist policies and attitudes will impose on marginalised and already oppressed populations has a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will result from a Clinton presidency’. My father ...”

“... reminiscences of a major politician, Brougham’s was the first full autobiography, and Lord John Russell’s the first broad-canvas memoir by a former prime minister. Even so, these were not generally regarded as good examples: Holland had an exotic reputation, Brougham’s Life and Times was an egotistic fantasy and Russell wrote his book too late in ...”

“... intellectuals included some famous names: Bryce, Courtney, Freeman, Lecky, Lowe, J.S. Mill, John Morley. A nervous concern about the consequences of mass franchise, worries about the concessionary mood of the Liberal leaders – especially in the face of violence in Ireland – led many Late Victorian Liberal intellectuals to drift rightwards toward ...”

“... gives something of the flavour: Albert Camus, Algerian goalie and French Existentialist, never took a penalty but it would have been interesting to watch him try (if, say, a penalty shoot-out against a Structuralist XI went all the way to the respective goalkeepers during sudden death). Would Camus have beaten an upright and non-diving Russian Formalist ...”

“... and a translator of Ibsen, was inspired to write the first major biography for 25 years by seeing John Barton’s Oslo production of Peer Gynt ‘and wondering why a man who could create a comic circus like that should choose to devote the rest of his life to writing a series of dark analyses of unhappiness’. The explanation he comes up with is that between ...”