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“... Mary-Kay will confirm’. Oh well. I’m reminded of a lecture by the eminent Harvard sociologist George Homans whose peroration, delivered in a ringing Bostonian fortissimo, was that ‘the really nasty thing about these investigations is that some people are liked by people they do not themselves like!’ 15 June. Talk with Stephen Graubard, editor of the ...”

“... values’, the ‘good’ (or the ‘bad’) old days, the Dunkirk spirit, the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald – in all such sloganising, the ghosts of the past are conjured up to clinch arguments about the present. And in no field, paradoxically, is this ancestral magic so pervasive as in science – above all, in myth-making introductions to scientific ...”

“... victories, are themselves uncertain about how to end it. What will there be to pick up when George Bush leaves office in two years’ time? If he lasts that long.Conclusions and opinions aren’t Woodward’s strongest suit. He offers no general summations to his three books, no views on the people he interviews. He allows his subjects to speak for ...”

“... utter determination to hit the big time. ‘I was ambitious in my head,’ his schoolfriend George Underwood told Trynka, ‘but not like he was.’ On that ‘sunny evening’ in July 1972, Trynka recalls: His look is lascivious, amused. As an audience of excited teens and outraged parents struggle to take in the multicoloured quilted jumpsuit, the ...”

“... Prebble’s that all these tartans were nothing but hype: a stunt devised chiefly by Scott to make George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in August 1822 as splendiferous as possible. In his anonymous shilling pamphlet ‘HINTS addressed to the INHABITANTS OF EDINBURGH AND OTHERS in prospect of HIS MAJESTY’S VISIT by an Old Citizen’, Scott dubbed a principal ...”

“... cut in relief. Mackintosh was an artist as well as an architect. With his future wife, Margaret Macdonald, her sister Frances and her future husband, Herbert McNair, he was one of ‘The Four’, responsible for paintings of attenuated female figures with intense faces, and stylised curvilinear decorative swirls. To their critics, their work was the ...”

“... Hanks ought to allow, he’s not Alec Guinness. And what about Intolerable Cruelty (2003), with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, which doesn’t look like a Coen Brothers movie because it doesn’t look as if it was directed by anybody? Still, they can’t be after a single perfect film, since their best work falls into such distinct modes: quirky ...”

“... We have one more thing: the most nerve-straining title of all and the one discussed long ago by George Steiner in his Trotsky and the Tragic Imagination. Isaac Deutscher, the non-Jewish Jew par excellence, hesitated in calling his Trotsky trilogy The Prophet. There are messianic traditions after all, and there are messianic traditions. Yet surely Irving ...”

“... other poets’; and the publishers, who ‘all speak, none harkens.’ She was, according to Kate Macdonald’s introduction to this edition, ‘a natural champion of 1920s middlebrow culture’, but the book is also veined with her scholarly preoccupations. She had a passion for words and especially for logomachy. She liked to invent new terms to see if they ...”

“... by excluding dissent. Enrolling at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, he read Dwight Macdonald’s essay ‘The Responsibility of Peoples’. Macdonald asked why, if the German people were to be held responsible for Nazi atrocities, the American people were not thought responsible for the saturation bombing of ...”

“... to assimilate into American society. ‘I never heard anybody call him “Schwartz”,’ Dwight Macdonald recalled. He was simply, bathetically, Delmore. Schwartz once conceded to John Berryman that ‘Delmorean’ would be the word used should his ‘verse prove attractive to posterity’. Posterity has not proved kind, something Ben Mazer’s edition of ...”

“... London foreign correspondents: Nevinson of the Daily Chronicle, Steevens of the Daily Mail and MacDonald of the Argus (Steevens, the most gifted, would die in Ladysmith); all of them published books which Foden has used as source material. Steevens seems to have been a classic Guardian type: ‘Milner, Rhodes, even Chamberlain is culpable to some ...”

“... over the English Channel towards the chalk cliffs of Old Harry Rocks in Dorset, both the shot and George Fenton’s orchestral score slyly reminiscent of the opening of The Sound of Music, though the solitary figure who gradually comes into view on the cliff edge is dressed in a sturdy bright blue anorak rather than the costume of a novice nun. Unlike Julie ...”

“... been a salient issue in British politics since the second half of the 18th century.* The rise of George III’s favourite, John Stuart, Third Earl of Bute, to prime minister only 16 years after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745-46 – when the invading Highland army got as far as Derby – provoked a torrent of outrage in the English media. At the forefront of ...”

“... tout court. When millions enjoy something, the interest it arouses need not be aesthetic. George Orwell saw propaganda in boys’ weeklies and ‘the worm’s-eye view of life’ in seaside postcards. He was hardly concerned with Frank Richards as a novelist or (despite his essay’s title) the art of Donald McGill. A better reason for paying ...”