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“... of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever written ... I am not, of course, claiming a place for myself among the masters I have named above. (Although, when Lamb is at his most whimsical, I sometimes think I could go a couple ...”

“... identical conditions for withdrawal, but under less shameful and deceitful circumstances, to which Johnson and even Humphrey had been ready to accede in 1968. Quite hardened men on Kissinger’s own staff were able to see the gruesome fallacy. ‘We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions,’ drily remarked John Negroponte, a rough-stuff ...”

“... way. They include Charlotte Brontë and stretch to Scott Joplin, Alan Turing, Sylvia Plath and Diane Arbus.On 26 June this year, the paper ran a belated obituary of Valerie Solanas, who died in 1988 and is famous for having shot Andy Warhol twenty years earlier. The year before the shooting, Solanas published the SCUM Manifesto, which began: ‘Life in ...”

“... that a better world is possible and we are prepared to fight for it’, in the words of Diane Abbott. The crowd cheered wildly at any mention of increased house-building, a break with neoliberalism, the end of austerity, support for junior doctors, environmentalism, the end of tuition fees, nationalising the railways. But nothing matched the ...”

“... MPs, partly for the benefit of the journalists crouching at the door; it is hard to disagree with Diane Abbott’s verdict that the intention was to ‘break [Corbyn] as a man’. The abuse wasn’t directed only at him: staffers could expect similar treatment in the corridors, Corbynite MPs from their putative colleagues in the Commons, often from those fond ...”