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“... has to offer might have been more accurately if less enticingly labelled Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding. Hollywood fits rather curiously into Vidal’s saga of American political history. Chronologically it is the sequel to Empire (1987) but also the predecessor of Washington DC, the novel set in the 1940s with which Vidal started the sequence more than ...”

“... onto the back foot, and several struggled to make the move. Some who did, such as Gilbert Harding (another Cambridge graduate and former schoolteacher, later a famously agitated contestant on What’s My Line?), were known for their melancholy and their loneliness as well as for their charitable work. Terence Gallacher remembers that Gamlin constantly ...”

“... tree in the south of France, having his hair combed by his wife. The ravenous Francis Wyndham and James Fox spoon up a pitifully notional soufflé made from wild strawberries which they have picked ‘all day’ at Chatwin’s insistence and which he has finicked down to an airy nothing. His host in Shropshire, Martin Wilkinson, recalls a local pub in which ...”

“... thoughts have not occurred and this particular routine, which might be called ‘Henry James at the End of the Fork’, leads us in turn to think about Burroughs’s own relationship with America and the success be has made of it. The monstrous and unreadable nature of much of the fiction, the careful management of the revolt and the rationed ...”

“... of being a smoker, but it is an impulse of capitalism rather than tobacco itself: the empire of James B. Duke, which formed the basis of the modern tobacco industry, began a century ago with the mass production of cigarettes on the Bonsak machine; the habit of tobacco is vastly older. I live over a 24-hour minicab office and a forecourt full of cars. The ...”

“... who rather enjoy it.’ Twenty-five, thirty years after the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only ...”

“... William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper ...”

“... for race unity’ instead of ‘class unity’. (His childhood friend in Trinidad C.L.R. James, who had given Nkrumah a letter of introduction to Padmore, was then at work on The Black Jacobins.) A version of socialist internationalism emerged from the conference, with Soviet influence in parenthesis, seeming to offer Pan-Africanism a promising ...”

“... speak to Ewen MacAskill, the Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent, in London. We talk about Luke Harding, the paper’s reporter in northern Iraq, and what a good position he’s in there, with relative freedom to move about and report, and the likelihood of him being first into a series of important towns: Kirkuk, Tikrit. Whereas Suzanne in Baghdad, and our ...”

“... double agents, which had been MI5’s speciality in both world wars. Yet, according to Sir John Harding, governor of Cyprus in the 1950s: As far as ill-treatment, rough treatment on capture, I think that it is something which inevitably does happen. After all if you’ve got troops or police who are engaged in an anti-terrorist operation and they’ve seen ...”

“... worth its salt has a political interest. It is the contradiction of non-political politics. Jason Harding’s assiduously researched study of the magazine is excellent at nipping behind its tone of Olympian hauteur to reveal the sectarian, manipulative, suavely malicious politics of the literary marketplace that lie behind it. Framed against a world of ...”

“... Not really, Edwards thinks. Can the journal be described, as the historian James Clifford argued in a famous essay in 1981, as ‘ethnographic surrealism’? Hardly. Was Leiris really in pursuit of the exotic ‘black Edens’ he had glimpsed with the arrival of jazz in Paris after World War One? Pretty much: they led him to Africa in ...”

“... opened fire on the protesters, leaving 69 dead and 189 injured. In his essay for this new edition, James Sanders suggests that the fate of Eersterust ‘would have taught [Cole] that the struggle with apartheid can never be a fair contest. To resist one had to learn to cheat.’ The Sharpeville massacre, which took place on Cole’s twentieth birthday, may ...”

“... Jane Austen’s sense of the society she lived in is subject to a variety of interpretations. D.W. Harding detected her ‘controlled hatred’ for it, while most of her fans regard her as supremely at home in it, using it as a vehicle for amusement and perception and something like comfortable fantasy. She repels and attracts; she can be attacked and ...”

“... and moderate? Master and slave? Dictator and compliant intellectual? (This was how C.L.R. James saw them in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, written during his detention on Ellis Island in 1952 and republished last year.) Or are they merely chalk and cheese? Would the debates of the 1930s and 1940s, which cast Ahab as a Hitler or a Stalin and ...”