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“... grows with every volume; whose supposed stature, let’s say, since even Durrell’s friend Henry Miller had his doubts about this character. ‘I never get the conviction that he was the great writer you wish him to seem.’ I don’t think this shortfall weakens the Quartet as much as it might, since we are not required to believe in Pursewarden’s ...”

“... civil servants and the Opposition about the evils of socialism, likes to relax, as her confidant, John Vaizey, put it, by ‘exciting herself with books about the horrors of Marxism’. ‘At the moment I’m rereading The Fourth Protocol,’ she happily tells a journalist. Rereading. Jonathan Miller talks of her ...”

“... Shrew was about. My co-star in the Shakespeare and who played Beecham in The Chiltern Hundreds was John Scaife, a friend whom I lost sight of after university and only this last year discovered had become a distinguished molecular biologist at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and ...”

“... back to the Millerite movement and the Great Disappointment that followed the failure of William Miller’s prediction that Christ would return on 22 October 1844. Although Miller retired into obscurity, one of his leading disciples, Hiram Edson, mitigated the disappointment on claiming that he had seen a vision of Christ ...”

“... Even those determined to assimilate – like the successful businessman who buys one of the shoes John Lennon was wearing the day he was murdered, and religiously slips it on every evening – are torn between Vietnamese and American customs. The stories skilfully trace the dilemmas and pains of immigrant experience, and they also constitute a wide-ranging ...”

“... in 1968 by Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell) by a single enticing paragraph from a 1940 review of Max Miller at the Holborn Empire, attached as a footnote to ‘The Art of Donald McGill’. The same four-volume collection contains 20 pieces Orwell contributed to newspapers, anthologies and magazines while on the BBC staff, but includes nothing he wrote as a ...”

“... downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not quite proper that distinguished experts ...”

“... as ‘the genial observer of the social scene’ – sympathetic to the working classes like the Miller and the Reeve, mildly satirical of established religious figures like the Monk, Friar and Prioress, respectful of solid moral worth in the Parson and Plowman, but capable of extending a hand to mavericks like the Wife of Bath. As for the ...”

“... speaks to the butlers and the chauffeurs, the studio wives, the bit-part players, to the Arthur Miller, Dennis Hopper and Gore Vidal part of the universe, and none of them lets her down, or lets her off. It is a wild compendium of stories about what it is to be a child in a world of childish adults, and her book feels political, a meditation on the moral ...”

“... for Variety describes present-day actors as ‘fey’, ‘goofy’ and ‘boy-men’, and Frank Miller (director of The Spirit: ‘Rookie cop returns from the beyond as The Spirit’) believes that ‘Hollywood is great at producing male actors but sucks at producing men.’ Kanfer backs his columnists up with the opinion of Harvey C. Mansfield, ‘a ...”

“... back for a good long while. I don’t know that he’s still not over it. Fifty Septembers ago, John Steinbeck set out across America with his old standard poodle Charley as company. It was election season, as it was this September: Nixon-Kennedy. Steinbeck was 58, younger than the Maestro and myself, and near the end of his life. One can feel it in his ...”

“... who Trump believed had cost him the popular vote in 2016. The census bureau’s chief scientist, John Abowd, estimated that at least 630,000 households (mainly Asian Americans and Latinos) were likely to be deterred, resulting in fewer congressional seats (and electoral college votes) as well as reduced federal spending in Democrat-leaning states. The ...”

“... biography, Travels over Feeling, the 15-year-old Russell is already referring to Walt Whitman, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg (prefiguring later, more explicit involvements with queer sexuality, paganism and utopian politics). There is also an Alan Watts name-drop and a lot of talk about Buddhism.It isn’t easy, reading the early pages of Travels over ...”

“... so that the frontier was now seen as a gateway to world power and economic abundance. (John F. Kennedy’s reference to a ‘new frontier’ in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 1960 carried this implication.) The myth of a West dominated by small family farms (Jefferson’s vision of the future) had already given way ...”

“... as I Benandanti in 1964, and has now been skilfully, even elegantly translated into English by John and Anne Tedeschi. Night Battles follows the fortunes of the benandanti through a series of Inquisition trials from 1575, when they first appear in the records, until 1676, when both they and the witches had ceased to be of much interest to the Church ...”