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“... Winning is very important to Christopher Hitchens. Dr Johnson was said to ‘talk for victory’, and by all accounts it seems the same might be said of Hitchens. He certainly writes for victory. His preferred genre is the polemic; his favoured tone mixes forensic argument with high-octane contempt. And no one can accuse him of only picking on boys his own size: he is happy to take the ring against tubby, bespectacled former diplomats and little, shrivelled old ladies as well as (special contempt here) relatively fit joggers ...”

“... Profound embarrassment has greeted the publication of R.W. Johnson’s book on the shooting-down of a Korean airliner over Russian airspace. Even its serialisation in the Sunday Telegraph showed signs of embarrassment, as though the editors had not realised what they were commissioning. ‘Experts’ with strong connections with the Central Intelligence Agency have been hired to ‘dispose of’ the book in important people’s newspapers, and most of the media have responded with their most deadly weapon: silence ...”

“... hardback publication), while cultivating a stockade in deepest Gloucestershire. With what the poet Paul Holman very perceptively describes as ‘the genuine pulp writer’s trance’, Allen’s cutups of tabloid scare stories did achieve moments of prophetic vision. The shamamstic fireplay of a consciousness at the end of its tether, written out. His ...”

“... warned the Government that things would only go from bad to worse.* But Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were interested above all in the effects the war would have on the elections of 1964, 1968 and 1972 respectively. The source of the revelations was not a long-haired anti-war radical but one of us: a Marine officer, an insider’s insider, who ...”

“... a widely held view, in Britain, the United States, in Europe and throughout the Commonwealth. When Paul Johnson appears to be talking sense on a contemporary issue, and when the defence of the monarchy is left to such characters as Lords Rees-Mogg and St John of Fawsley, things are clearly getting rather serious. For the Prince and his advisers, the last ...”

“... working hours, the long absences from home, the aphrodisiac of power’ for dilemmas of this sort. Paul Johnson, in the same issue, was uncharacteristically backward in dishing out his unfashionable medicine: ‘Cecil Parkinson may have broken one of the Ten Commandments. He has also been foolish. But there has been nothing vicious in his behaviour. He ...”

“... administered a spanking. (For all I know, this is one of the many triggers that may have set Paul Johnson off.)Tariq Ali was the moving spirit of that rally and this book – which includes the spanking picture – brings it all back with exquisite vividness. It’s hard to recall what a hate-figure he was in those days. I had a friend, a ...”

“... a special unit of gendarmes entered the priory of Saint François at Nice in search of a certain Paul Touvier, who was living there under the name of Paul Lacroix. An arrest was made and within half an hour Touvier was on his way to Fresnes prison in Paris. He was eventually installed in its hospital. The gendarmes had ...”

“... activities: I have heard him praise Jean-Marie Benoist, although he had become a Giscardien, and Paul Victor, although ‘he was helping Sartre to write bad books’). But he remained apart. He rarely spoke about himself, and few people knew anything about him. Some said that he was Belgian by origin. In fact, he was born in Algeria and educated at the ...”

“... work by Charles Mauron, Jean-Pierre Richard, Robert Greer Cohn, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Leo Bersani, Malcolm Bowie and others. It might seem surprising, therefore, not to find a single full-length biography published between Henri Mondor’s 1941 Vie de Mallarmé and Gordon Millan’s Mallarmé: A Throw of the Dice. Millan notes in his ...”

“... theoretical and ethical substance to this Establishment philistinism. For him, it was going home. Paul Johnson in his tribute to Fuller in the Sunday Telegraph wrote: ‘He insisted that art criticism had become the prisoner not only of an undistinguished clique but of a base and repellent vernacular. He aimed to restore it to English ...”

“... influence, was never on such close terms with Sartre as he claimed. She says the same about Paul Victor, Sartre’s last collaborator, with whom he was working on important projects in the months before his death. Georges Michel, a communist watchmaker who wrote plays and, through them, became linked with Sartre and Les Temps Modernes, also condemns ...”

“... part, which begins in the antebellum period, focuses on the experiences of ‘two Pauls’ – Paul Cameron, the son of Duncan Cameron, one of the largest slaveowners in North Carolina, and his slave Paul Hargress (originally named Hargis after a previous owner) – and their families. Duncan Cameron prided himself on ...”

“... In Like a Fiery Elephant, his recent biography of B.S. Johnson,* Jonathan Coe writes feelingfully about the perils of too much Eng. Lit. He ‘emerged from the experience of reading English at Cambridge’, he explains in the introduction, ‘imbued with a thriving, unshakeable contempt for anyone who had had the temerity to attempt the writing of literature in the last seventy or eighty years ...”

“... some 42 per cent of the adult population do not pay income tax, and, according to calculations by Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, ‘90 per cent of income tax is paid by just a third of the population.’ But even that figure hides the staggering inequality that any just fiscal system would need to address, where the focus needs to be ...”