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“... invite visitors such as Malcolm Muggeridge to a feast of jam puffs, cream cakes and scones. George Bernard Shaw, who corresponded with him in his later years, referred to him as ‘Childe Alfred’. Like a child he was always accusing people of being cruel to him, particularly aggrieved by those who fed him, got bitten and, once bitten, withdrew. He seems to ...”

“... of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black Dogs is in part about how Bernard Tremaine, a politician, scientist and rationalist, drifts away from his wife, June (and vice versa), because of what he deems her fanciful, emotional, overdetermined reading of the trauma that was meted out on her in 1946 by the black dogs of the ...”

“... rely on well-known public figures to lend him a cloak of respectability. Figures such as Haines, Bernard Donoughue and Peter Jay, the former British ambassador in Washington – some of the stars of the Labour governments of the 1970s – were happy to be signed up to Maxwell’s payroll. The case of Haines was especially striking: when Maxwell bought the ...”

“... I have a photocopy in my files) that it was not Barbie but a group of Eichmann’s henchmen in Paris who made the decision to send the children to Auschwitz, where they were killed. The final mockery of justice in the Barbie case was the delivery of the judgment – on an indictment of over three hundred points – precisely on the schedule announced five ...”

“... and her doctor felt ‘the time has come when V. must go either to Malmaison [a sanatorium near Paris where she had spent earlier periods of crisis] or to some home.’ Eliot, who paid various medical bills for her, was encouraged by his lawyer, by the doctors involved and by Vivien’s brother to agree to the ‘certification’ that would place her in an ...”

“... him. Fertile ideas were popping up all over the place in this seedtime of quantum physics. In Paris, in 1923, Louis DeBroglie had put forward the outlandish notion that electrons were both waves and particles. In 1925, Heisenberg began to demonstrate mathematically how this could be possible. By 1926, quantum mechanics, the search for mathematical models ...”

“... entered the First World War. His masters, as he himself acknowledged, were H.L. Mencken and George Bernard Shaw. Even the most ideologically liquored-up combatant in the culture wars of the last couple of decades might blanch at taking them as models. The sobering fact is that, by the time ‘the last intellectuals’ were in their pomp, it was already too ...”

“... as a ‘toucher’ and a man who used to ‘bum off people’. Then he went on: ‘I met him in Paris several times. He was a morose, completely self-contained little man. I was curious about him. I admired certain aspects of his work.’ He told another interviewer that he had letters from Joyce, ‘who asked me some years ago to make some confidential ...”

“... this volume – which is something like an extended pamphlet, on the order, as he says himself, of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Idéologie française – but rather his more comprehensive Marxism and the French Left (1986), which sets out to tell this story from the 19th century to the present, and not merely, as Khilnani frames it in his book, from the Liberation ...”

“... Klaus Kinski really is a daft actor.’ No one ever used the word ‘daft’ so compellingly. Bernard Jacobson (gallery-owner): Karel wasn’t a collector like you hear about. I always felt the whole thing melded into one: his love of ancient art; ceramics, modern and contemporary art; pickled herring and bagels and smoked salmon and cream cheese with ...”

“... for a calculating machine. He later became a corresponding member of the Académie Royale in Paris and first president of the Societät der Wissenschaften in Berlin, and when he obtained salaried work at the Hanoverian court at the age of 30, he took it for granted that he would continue to pursue his vocation as a universal intellectual and perpetual ...”

“... down. Yours, James Prendergast.’ He puts this into an envelope addressed ‘Mr Georges Bidault, Paris, France’, and pops it in the post. A few days later (Benny now departed), there is a knock at the door. My father, alone in the flat, opens the door. A Special Branch officer asks him if he is James Prendergast and if he wrote the letter the officer shows ...”

“... On​ 2 November 1921, James Joyce wrote from Paris to his aunt Josephine in Dublin asking if it was ‘possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No. 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 off the ground and drop unhurt ...”

“... United States, sped through the icy North Atlantic while dining as if in the finest restaurant in Paris. Lords of the universe. Within a few hours most were dead. We know a great deal about the glitterati on the doomed liner and the stories are both absurdly delicious and irresistibly sad. Mahala Douglas, wife of the Quaker Oats heir, sat at the table where ...”

“... in Other Passports. They are all formal verse and one of them, ‘To Pete Atkin: Letter from Paris’, was his initial attempt at ottava rima, the stanza chosen later for his extended verse diaries. In a letter slightly earlier than the one to Atkin, he sets out what by then had become, and was to remain for many years, his creed. Interestingly, this ...”