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“... little man, with a staccato, military manner’, according to the historian of psychoanalysis Paul Roazen. He spent his life championing Freud, but even Freud described him as ‘a disagreeable person, who wants to display himself in ruling, angering and agitating’, and referred to him once as ‘the liar from Wales’. Still, it’s possible that it ...”

“... with the new leader by pointing out ‘his chair’ when visitors came to the Crossman casa in Vincent Square. I doubt that even Widmerpool would have gone that far, but it’s easy to imagine him stressing, as did Crossman the intellectual populist, that ‘without any affectation’ Wilson ‘prefers the kind of unassuming, comfortable home life which he ...”

“... Wanger had started work on a follow-up to Blockade, adapted by Lawson from the journalist Vincent Sheean’s memoir, Personal History. The hero – Fonda again – witnesses fascist brutality while covering the war in Spain; later, in Germany, he is repelled by Nazi anti-Semitism, rescues several Jews from persecution and marries a Jewish woman. Breen ...”

“... of Being and Immortality are basically the sexual biographies of Tomás, Tereza and Sabina, of Paul and Agnes and Laura and Bernard and Rubens – whose sex life (Kundera does love his taxonomies) goes through five phases, from ‘the period of athletic muteness’ to something called (coyness is also of the process) ‘the mystical period’. Slowness ...”

“... malevolence is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of ...”

“... Drugs return Dustan to the realm of pure sensation: I don’t think I don’t think about Vincent and how the condom broke last year, how there was blood, and how three months later he tested positive. I don’t think about how I’ve been waiting to die for seven years. In this euphoric present, everything seems like a good idea and an absolute ...”

“... MSPs are ‘body swerving’ all attempts to break the deadlock. An exception is the Labour MSP Paul Sweeney, who has campaigned energetically for a resolution. He thinks that the GSA itself might now be willing to hand over the rebuild, but fears ‘nobody has the gumption to take it on.’ As well as mentioning Notre-Dame he makes a more telling if ...”

“... and beat him into signing a statement accusing his mother. Her authority is ‘the historian Vincent Cronin, writing in 1974’ – close to source, then. The effect of the accusations, brought out in open court, was to swing some sympathy Antoinette’s way, at least in the public gallery. That didn’t, of course, influence the verdict. It was a show ...”

“... with ‘the civilising coloniser’. Forty years after Fanon, in The Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy tilted the idea of double consciousness towards a more elastic, miscegenated doubleness, proposing that cultures ostensibly defined by ethnicity – and divided historically as slaver and slave, coloniser and colonised, white and Black – are not ...”

“... less than three months after the downing of Flight 103, the then secretary of state for transport, Paul Channon, had lunch with some journalists. He talked, indiscreetly, of the brilliant detective work undertaken by the smallest police force in the country. Arrests, he told the journalists, were imminent. Although such conversations are customarily regarded ...”

“... of Sea Power upon History (1890), we might stress the derring-do of the Royal Navy, or – as Paul Kennedy did recently – the role of public finance. Brewer concentrates on organisational factors, and isolates three that were crucial. First and foremost, Britain’s army and navy trebled in size in the century after the Glorious Revolution. By the ...”

“... cheer to the rafters each time Germany scored a goal. 8 June. Spot the typo, spare the blush. John Vincent writes from the University of Bristol: ‘In your memorable diaries you quote Disraeli’s view of May 1881, a month after his death. Would that other historians had access to such primary sources!’ 14 June. Alan Bennett’s letter to the LRB about my ...”

“... Sterling (John Slattery), the urbane old-money wit and rake who runs Accounts; Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), the spoiled, petulant, baby-faced young scion of neo-aristocratic New Netherlanders, also Accounts; and Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), who, from the position of senior secretary, makes partner and Accounts exec in her own right. Mad Men ...”

“... for Alain’. He was remarkably solicitous of her needs, and she of his. He welcomed her lover, Vincent, so long as Vincent agreed to be his disciple (there could only be one Master in the house). She also shared her mistresses with him, and dressed up as Lolita when they had dinner with Nabokov. She was ‘content, even ...”

“... savage passes through Tahiti, from Rousseau by way of Banks and the besotted crew of HMS Bounty to Paul Gauguin.And there were much gossiped about passages of dodgy behaviour on home soil. Departing on the voyage to the South Seas, Banks left behind a young lady, Harriet Blosset, so convinced he had made a promise to marry that she spent three years knitting ...”