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“... the ongoing struggle within the security establishment over the protocols of machismo.) Geoffrey Miller, the man who made ‘Gitmoize’ a household word, relieves a general at Guantanamo for being too ‘soft – too worried about the prisoners’ well-being’. Both the FBI and the CIA finally decide to pull out of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib because they ...”

“... Havel once, I seem to be the only playwright not personally acquainted with the deceased Arthur Miller and with some line on his life and work. Many of his plays I still haven’t seen, though years ago when I was reading everything I could get hold of on America and McCarthyism I came across Miller’s novel Focus, in ...”

“... the famous claim that he was only saying: ‘This is so, is it not?’). ‘That is what Henry James says about the novels of Arnold Bennett, and I think you will agree. It is final,’ he told the man who painted his portrait. Yet later, it seems, he somewhat revised this judgment. Over the famous change of mind about Dickens, MacKillop is ...”

“... Frederica hosts is called Through the Looking-Glass, and its pilot episode features Jonathan Miller and Richard Gregory talking animatedly about mirrors and doubles, both of which figure prominently in A Whistling Woman’s own symbolic repertoire. (As she did in Babel Tower, where she brought on Anthony Burgess as a witness for the defence in her ...”

“... old ladies as well as (special contempt here) relatively fit joggers. His indictments of Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton have been among the glories of the prosecuting counsel’s art in recent years. Taking the global village as his courtroom, Hitchens asks us, the jury, to stare with wonder and loathing at these singular specimens ...”

“... there had been no good way not to fight. Thomson’s father took him to see Laurence Olivier’s Henry V in 1945, the year after its release. ‘He said it was a matter of duty.’ The standard British movie fare of the day had plenty of ‘syrup’, he recalls, to ladle over the ‘suet pudding’ of tremulous national morale.Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), in ...”

“... them to propagate a demoralised, sometimes seriously mistaken view of our culture. James Handley, Henry Grey Graham and even T.C. Smout are shown to have assumed a sort of inherent backwardness, a ‘centuries-old sleep in levels of civilisation (housing, farming, politics, behaviour) from which we were awakened by the 1707 Union to a sudden apocalypse of ...”

“... British-born professing Jews, of which the bar to a Parliamentary career was the most obvious. Henry Mayhew, the great chronicler of London life in the mid-19th century, was told by a Jewish professional that it was unlikely that one Jew in ten, ‘activated solely by his own feelings, would trouble himself to walk the length of the street in which he ...”

“... Italian soldiers are unlikely to have called Hemingway giovanni Americano, and when Johnny Miller missed his stroke while rowing he was not catching crabs. How Griffin is going to get Hemingway’s extraordinarily eventful last forty years into only two more volumes if he goes on at this rate is a question only time will answer. Jeffrey Meyers, in his ...”

“... secular aims, enjoyed the backing of young Christian biologists such as William Carpenter, William Henry Flower and William Kitchen Parker. Never, he writes, was it simply a matter of Church-baiting rationalists triumphing over religious obscurantism: rather, a more subtle attempt ‘jointly undertaken by agnostics, deists and some Christians, to ...”

“... You’d never guess from the Noble-Hogg emphasis that this poet’s favourite novel was Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling. Mackenzie is one of Noble and Hogg’s many bêtes noires. He’s the comfortable, patronising establishment lawyer who pats Burns on the head, then scorns the drunken helot bard. Yet, emerging in part from Adam Smith’s ...”

“... response was ‘Now, jump out with me, Ba!’ And of course, miraculously, she did. J. Hillis Miller plausibly speculated that part of the fascination of Miss Barrett was her very inaccessibility, ‘immured in darkness and jealously guarded’: in Browning’s imagination her liberation assumed an operatic immensity, like the prisoners blinking into the ...”

“... and friendly with the Nicholsons.28 March, Palm Sunday. Remember this a propos a joke of Jonathan Miller’s, who, seeing a woman coming back from church holding a cross made of reeds said that it was literally the last straw.1 April. There is currently a row going on about late night raves on Primrose Hill where, lacking toilet facilities on the ...”

“... at last arrived. Not particularly memorable, one church does have a noteworthy memorial:Richard Henry Burden Cattell M.A.Rector of the Warhams 1928-1947Captain of the English Rugby Football team 1900Chaplain to the Forces at Gallipoli 1915.This tablet is placed here in remembrance by his seven daughters.It’s a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett.6 August. All ...”

“... used, possibly for the last time, to sign the deed of surrender handing the abbey over to Henry VIII’s commissioners. Over at Rievaulx we film in the rain and in the cavernous latrine below the monks’ dormitory. With a lighting cameraman this would have taken most of the day, but brought up in the brisker school of music video Ben Taylor, who ...”