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“... raging sex-obsessed Jew uses bad words in a book, and suddenly in 1969 it is described in the Washington Post as ‘the most important book of my generation’? Portnoy’s Complaint has a passage about the stand-up comedy that is so obviously one of the sources of the book’s vitality: ‘That’s who the black humorists are – of course! – the Henny ...”

“... of Hobsbawm in its own records, which were housed in the Registry, described by the MI5 veteran Peter Wright as ‘a mass of dry paper’ inside which ‘were warm trails waiting to be followed’. This repository, containing an estimated 500,000 files by the mid-1950s, was organised according to an elaborate system of cross-referencing between Personal ...”

“... Edmund Blunden, L.A.G. Strong and Arthur Bryant; in came A.L. Rowse, Maurice Richardson, Peter Quennell and Nancy Mitford. More important, it was Connolly who introduced Astor to Orwell, who became his friend and mentor, and whose literary style he so admired that new arrivals on the paper were greeted by a circular on green paper setting out ...”

“... doesn’t stroll, he doesn’t do hands-in-pockets. He doesn’t drop in on Hackney Wick, he hits Washington like Livingstone (David) in darkest Africa. Gill’s arrest came when he persisted in recording the hustling convoys of lorries churning up new dirt roads. Hours in the nick. Phone calls to establish his bona fides, his connections. Thick wheels taller ...”

“... attention of Facebook’s first external investor, the now notorious Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Again, The Social Network gets it right: Thiel’s $500,000 investment in 2004 was crucial to the success of the company. But there was a particular reason Facebook caught Thiel’s eye, rooted in a byway of intellectual history. In the course of his ...”

“... the former speaking on occasion of his ‘childlike innocence’, the latter comparing him to Peter Pan. Gopal’s image is more telling still: early on, Nehru ‘made a cradle of emotional nationalism and rocked himself in it’, as if a child cocooning himself to sleep away from the outside world. He had, of course, many more adult qualities: hard ...”

“... resources and surveillance time monitoring such well-known left-wing subversives as Jack Straw and Peter Mandelson, as well as CND and Vietnam War protesters. More important, from a counter-terrorist perspective, it was deeply involved in the British state’s confrontation with modern Irish Republican terrorism. Until 1992, the Met Special Branch had sole ...”

“... arrests and all-round discomforts that made life for everyone extremely hard. While we were there Peter Hansen, the Danish commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main aid organisation serving Palestinians, spoke out strongly about the dangers – including starvation – of Israeli policies in the West Bank and ...”

“... for the film was written by the poet and communist Montagu Slater, who wrote the libretto for Peter Grimes and worked with Auden on John Grierson documentaries such as Coal Face. Elisabeth Lutyens composed the music. She supplemented her income from writing orchestral and chamber music by creating scores for horror films and her skills in melodrama came ...”

“... at Harvard and dozens of readings and public talks over the next nine months, in California, Washington, Minnesota, Chicago, Buffalo and Providence – in all, between seventy and eighty engagements. And he wrote as many letters to Hale. Like Henry James and Henry Adams, Eliot returned after a long spell in Europe and felt – hauntedly – that coming ...”

“... Grenfell Recovery Scrutiny Committee on 18 January 2018.‘That sounds like a lot of money,’ the Washington lawyer Kenneth Feinberg said when I called him, ‘but it’s not really.’ Feinberg was the formal administrator of the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund, and he did the same job after the Boston Marathon bombing and after the mass shooting at a ...”