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“... and the libel laws to avoid prosecution, and Waugh felt the press had been craven. In 1977 Andrew Newton, the comically incompetent hit man who had missed Scott but killed his dog, Rinka, was released from prison and started hawking his story round the papers. Thorpe, as anxious to deny his homosexuality as the charge of attempted murder, set out to ...”

“... further than most in making sense of the society emerging from the ruins. This was no easy task. Christopher Clark’s recent history of 1848, Revolutionary Spring, shows that most Europeans experienced the preceding decades as a time of ‘flux and transition’. In France, a number of different political futures seemed possible. Some of these were ...”

“... give space to Ross. She was the model for Sally Bowles, the unpolitical fuckwit at the centre of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood had shared a flat with her. But in his novel ‘he created an ineradicable image of Jean that obscured the reality,’ an image that survived for decades into plays and films (I Am a Camera and Liza ...”

“... like that.’ ‘And how did that change?’ Ramona said a single word: ‘Rob.’ The days in St Christopher Place were almost languorous. We would bring coffee back to the flat and spread out, and I’d try to build a picture of how he did what he said he did. We put up whiteboards and he bamboozled me with maths. Sometimes he would write at the board for ...”

“... consultant) and Dr Michael Clark (a Parliamentary adviser). Southern Water enjoys the services of Andrew Bowden as its Parliamentary consultant. Southern Electricity expressed its appreciation of Ian Bruce by making him a gift of two fax machines. British Telecom uses Simon Coombs as its Parliamentary consultant, Midlands Electricity has ...”

“... politically conservative shell. Bellow’s former agent, Harriet Wasserman, whom he had jilted for Andrew Wylie, published a memoir titled Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow to vent her scorn. Others were less hostile but obtuse, such as Owen Barfield, a member of the Inklings who had tutored Bellow in the esoteric cosmology of Rudolf Steiner, but had a ...”

“... he was finding a refuge from pressures elsewhere; perhaps it was an illusion. The other from Christopher Dickey’s With the Contras, describing Fidel in Managua in 1980: Fidel Castro was in Managua the week Ronald Reagan was nominated in Detroit. He was the grand man of the celebration. He was holding court, it seemed as you watched him, among his ...”

“... diet’. The instinct Freud recognised as Thanatos was dramatised by Shaw as ‘the gospel of St Andrew Undershaft’. (Incidentally, Freud and Shaw shared a fondness for the Salvation Army.) Cusins is allured into accepting the Undershaft inheritance by the Dionysian intoxication of pure destruction (which is why Cusins’s Greek scholarship specialises in ...”

“... and conduct in those biographies of Cromwell which have a soft spot for God’s Englishman. Christopher Hill skips lightly over it. John Buchan refers to it as ‘a farmyard jape’ and excuses it on the grounds that ‘this thing touched the heart of his authority and he could permit no weakening.’ Others suggest that the story is probably royalist ...”

“... Along with perhaps the most prominent contemporary conservative critic, the former US Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, Johnson expected US globalism to readjust after the downfall of the Soviet Union. When no such adjustment came – in fact, the number of bases expanded – these critics began to question whether American globalism really grew out of the need ...”

“... Blair’s latest consensus hair policy, Lord Archer’s ironic, pre-penitentiary crop, the way Andrew Motion carries off his loden coat as he swirls between taxi and station platform. Julian Barnes’s novels are depilated at source, fat-free. Frisking them for a Moorcockian digression, a set of cellulite-heavy parentheses, would be like checking a tub of ...”

“... Revolution. Defoe boasted of wearing a mourning ring that had been given at the funeral of Christopher Love, a Presbyterian minister beheaded in 1653 for his part in a plot to overthrow Cromwell. Defoe mentions Love in his 1704 pamphlet The Dissenters Answer to the High-Church Challenge – it is reprinted in W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank’s excellent ...”

“... effusions, light-fingered Italian sonnets (delightfully translated for the Oxford edition by Andrew McNeillie), Ovidian neo-Latin elegies, two of the best answer poems in English (‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’), a masque and two of the best neo-Latin elegies ever written in England and probably even in Northern Europe. These pieces were ...”

“... and on 30 January he tweeted a denunciation of his intelligence chiefs Dan Coats, Gina Haspel and Christopher Wray: they were ‘naive’ for telling the Senate that Iran wasn’t working on a nuclear weapon. Half of Trump’s argument for exiting the agreement Obama signed with Iran in 2015, along with the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany, was that the ...”

“... serious but highly readable, were reappearing as Ash wrote: Rosalind Mitchison, T.C. Smout and Christopher Harvie were among the most successful authors. They wrote mostly narrative or social history, revealing unknown territory to generations who had learned almost nothing of Scotland’s past at school. Now, though, the fashion is more reflexive. Tom ...”