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“... use, the most valuable publication serving Johnson during the bicentennial year is certainly Donald Greene’s volume for the new Oxford Authors. Together with the splendid book in the same series devoted to Swift (edited by David Woolley and Angus Ross), this work floats easily above all rivals. The choice of contents is fresh and ...”

“... Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had ...”

“... to depend on ourselves and the universe’ after everything else was destroyed by the war. Dana Greene isn’t wrong when she says that Levertov’s early poems possess more biographical than poetic interest. But her first collection, The Double Image, which appeared in 1946, earned an appreciative mention from Vita Sackville-West in the Observer, and ...”

“... is probably true even of Irene. In the fiction, the political interest is primarily concerned, as Donald Greene said in his book on Johnson’s politics, ‘with the problems of psychology and morality that underlie political attitudes rather than with political questions themselves’. When Nekayah says ‘all natural and almost all political evils, are ...”

“... features as a shy Cold Warrior with a Communist Party friend and as a ‘round-faced Graham Greene figure’, closely studied by Alec Guinness when he was preparing to become George Smiley; he ‘could never make close ties with people’. Guy Burgess was ‘always dirty and smelt’. This diary is also a love story: ‘The sun was shining and Alan took ...”

“... people to whom he pays just tribute here. Grace Wyndham-Goldie added breadth to his vision and Donald Baverstock erratic flair. As DG, he was monarch of all he surveyed and could not see as far as he thought. Certainly an unfair disadvantage under which he suffered was the need to be seen as Director-General in something of the old style of that office, at ...”

“... If this is a bleaker, more disenchanted book than Reading for the Plot, it is largely because of Donald Trump, even though the former president isn’t granted the dignity of a mention. It begins with a quotation from Game of Thrones: ‘There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.’ One ...”

“... in America’s cities.Yet no American president has so flagrantly pandered to white grievance as Donald Trump, even as he has praised himself for doing more for Black Americans than anyone ‘except maybe Abraham Lincoln’. The significance of this ugly achievement should not be underestimated. Trump understood that euphemisms are no longer necessary when ...”

“... anywhere,’ then added: ‘But we’re going to send her back to be with him in California.’ Donald Trump Jr posted a photograph of a hammer and a pair of Y-fronts on Instagram with the caption: ‘Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.’ Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana tweeted a picture of Nancy Pelosi with the line: ‘That moment you ...”

“... The racism​ , xenophobia and violence of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is widely seen as an aberration, as if reasoned debate had been the default mode of American politics. But precursors to Trump do exist, candidates who struck electoral gold by appealing to exaggerated fears, real grievances and visceral prejudices ...”

“... when recalled to Moscow, had a marked tendency to check out. (One such ‘disappeared’ member, Donald Robinson, falsely accused of contact with Trotsky in Mexico, later turned up in Hiss’s handwritten notes of the period and is the reason some on the left have always doubted Hiss’s word.) Chambers contrived to separate himself from the clandestine ...”

“... Maugham’s own failure in organising a network. The spy-master has been degraded by Graham Greene into a shabby down-at-heel anonymous creature who will identify an innocent colleague with the mole he is hunting and kill the wrong man. For him Philby and Co are the modern equivalents of heroic Jesuit priests plotting against Elizabeth. In Le Carré’s ...”