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“... to imagine that common sense was socialism. As if all that were not enough, he thought Henry Miller was an outstanding novelist. As judicious (though not hopelessly balanced) accounts, the new biographies by Gordon Bowker and D.J. Taylor confirm what the law of averages might have led one to suspect: some of this is true, some of it questionable and the ...”

“... us flew out together, Air India, first class: Michael Foot, Jean Floud, William Radice, with Sir Richard Attenborough in pursuit. It was my pleasure to travel with my old friend and newly-minted Dame, Iris Murdoch. I’ve never travelled first before, and well! Cocktails, champagne, caviar, lobster ... Young Dame Iris, by the way, took all as her customary ...”

“... and now, like Baxandall, long removed from the immediate circle of Leavisians: for example, Karl Miller in this country, Richard Poirier and (perhaps surprisingly) Norman Podhoretz in New York. They fanned out into their own careers, but most, even if alienated or excommunicated, freely allow that he made his mark on ...”

“... teachers of English – about 10 per cent of the total. They include the founder of the LRB, Karl Miller. What is clear from both Hilliard’s and Ellis’s books is Leavis’s influence in English departments outside the UK. Hilliard gives the former students’ names and destinations (Canada, South Africa, Australia – only one to the United States) and ...”

“... that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away more positive than I’ve ever been. I think we’re getting some momentum built up.’ I heard about happiness. I heard Lieutenant General James Mattis say that ‘it’s a lot of fun to ...”

“... Norman Mailer. Is Mailer not, in Vidal’s throwaway line, one of the three Ms, along with Henry Miller and Charles Manson, ‘conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons, at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed’? (His initial defence, if that is what it was, was to compile the table ‘Number of times married, Number of ...”

“... sold out and had adulatory reviews. The Shankars met Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller, and over the next few years travelled all over Europe and eventually to the US, where Ravi heard Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong, beginning a lifelong fascination with New York.Ravi began taking small dance parts in the ...”

“... the more vulnerable Brexiters will fall victim to the tactical voting urged by Tony Blair and Gina Miller (who brought the Article 50 case against the government), and that more Labour MPs will hang on than currently seems likely. Even then, the best one can hope for is that May’s majority is kept under fifty. Her real gamble is that she will be able to ...”

“... Havel once, I seem to be the only playwright not personally acquainted with the deceased Arthur Miller and with some line on his life and work. Many of his plays I still haven’t seen, though years ago when I was reading everything I could get hold of on America and McCarthyism I came across Miller’s novel Focus, in ...”

“... and best investigative reporters (all two of them). Take a long and detailed article by Judith Miller, buried on page 12 of the New York Times: only in the 30th paragraph of 34 do we learn that prewar American Intelligence on Iraqi weapons sites was often ‘stunningly wrong’. In the words of a senior US officer: The teams would be given a packet, with ...”

“... the past itself can lodge a ‘thorn in the spirit’. ‘All children,’ according to Alice Miller (or at least according to her obituary, which appeared as I was writing this review), ‘suffer trauma and permanent psychic scarring at the hands of parents.’ How trauma made its initial move from exteriority to interiority doesn’t much concern Didier ...”

“... Hamlet’ has a more absolute meaning. In an early allusion, the writer of an elegy for Richard Burbage after his death in 1619 names his great roles as     young Hamlett, ould Hieronymoe, Kind Leer, the Greved More – where Hamlet is young as Lear is kind and the Moor grieved. The phrase, which may have been regular in use, gives a valuable ...”

“... friend. There was a sort of troika: Jocelyn Stevens, who’d bought it, Mark Boxer and Beatrix Miller, who was brought in as the editor, and who later edited Vogue. She was the one who had any sense, and Mark had all the impatient brilliant ideas. Mark asked would I be their theatre critic. I was always put behind a pillar on the second night. I don’t ...”

“... Russia Modernise?, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013) and Richard Sakwa’s Putin Redux (2014). New Year’s Eve 1999 – when Yeltsin appeared on Russian TV screens to announce his resignation as president in favour of Putin – is often taken to mark a major turning point, from the ‘fevered 1990s’ to the stability ...”

“... new wave of furious proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The ...”