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“... invested in the War Loan, to protect their finances against any postwar Labour government. As Michael Smith describes, these problems were exacerbated by the budget cuts which followed the end of hostilities. In 1919, MI5’s annual grant dropped from £100,000 to £30,000, forcing it into unsavoury alliances with the political Right. It recruited Maxwell ...”

“... isn’t true, at least not for me. I have had other deaths, but the death last month of my friend Michael Rogin was a shock. It’s not that we had, in recent years, spent much time together. I left Berkeley, where we taught together on the faculty of the University of California, in the mid-1990s, and almost immediately lost touch with most of my network of ...”

“... almost an old lady, invited two friends to luncheon in 1969 and they came on the wrong day: Herman declared Elizabeth had got it wrong and then sent what must have been a forged carbon copy of his original acceptance card ‘proving’ they had been due a day later. But Elizabeth, without ever admitting it to ...”

“... the New Yorker, got lost in the controversy it created. One of her aims was to draw attention to Herman Mankiewicz’s role in writing the screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941), and therefore in the success of the film. But, more interestingly, she was also evoking a whole school of New York writers, for whom Mankiewicz could be made to stand representative: a ...”

“... In​ the early 1920s, Herman J. Mankiewicz (‘Mank’) and Ben Hecht were not very successful writers in New York. Then Mank ventured west, the first of what was to become an exodus of literary talent to the Hollywood movie studios. In 1925, Mank summoned Hecht to join him with an offer of $300 a week to write for Paramount Pictures: ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots ...”

“... then began to get organised, quarrelled with their studios:‘Writers of the world unite!’ Herman Mankiewicz sardonically proclaimed. ‘You have nothing to lose but your brains!’ Hamilton evokes the stints in Hollywood of various distinguished figures – Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, Nathanael West, the photogenic Faulkner – but also looks at the ...”

“... to backwoods institutions, consider Harvard Medical School, which allowed Professor Judith Lewis Herman to purvey extravagantly exaggerated theories of ‘recovered memory’ syndrome. The same institution harbours Professor John Mack, who believes that beings from outer space are abducting men and women and conducting fertility experiments on them. As ...”

“... that Naoksa does not want to leave the cart, not yet at any rate. There follows a scene worthy of Herman Charles Bosman. In it, Sher demonstrates not only his wit but also his ability to enter the minds of characters working at complete cross-purposes, with dire consequences for themselves – and for the future of South Africa.   ‘Right, come ...”

“... funding operation for the Contras, with dramatic ads signed by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Midge Decter, Michael Novak, Charlton Heston (who raised funds in Europe for the cause) and the usual right-wing backers. Bo Hi Pak led off the campaign – backed by Reagan ‘with all my heart’ – with a $100,000 contribution. Such gestures win the Moonies hearts and ...”

“... interesting thing about the writer in question. Often, though, this invented self is a problem. Michael Wood’s oustandingly brilliant new book is in part a corrective to the public persona adopted by his subject. Wood calls this persona ‘Nabokov the mandarin’, and robustly describes it as ‘a set ... of ...”

“... same man. The two most recent books on Traven before Mr Wyatt’s The Man who was B. Traven – Michael Baumann’s scholarly B. Traven: An Introduction and Judy Stone’s journalistic The Mystery of B. Traven – agree that Marut and Traven were the same man. Moreover, Judy Stone, who questioned Torsvan-Croves remorselessly when she visited him, was ...”

“... always hated each other move towards co-operation?There is also a genre of ecological literature. Michael Allaby, former editor of the Ecologist, has collected a set of golden quotables from ancient and modern thinkers. In Thinking Green: An Anthology of Essential Ecological Writing, quotes from doomsayers such as Malthus and Paul Ehrlich are sprinkled in ...”

“... of New York City’s Department of Correction. All of them were being held on Rikers Island. Herman Diaz, 52, choked to death on an orange; several other detainees tried to revive him but no guard came to his aid. Dashawn Carter, 25, hanged himself two days after returning to Rikers from a state psychiatric hospital. George Pagan, 48, was plainly ill ...”

“... wondering why. There is a recoil from the cruelties of man to man and of man to the natural world. Herman in Enemies was always planning to become a vegetarian: Aaron in Shosha did become one, and in Love and Exile Singer describes his own conversion. In a note on his most recent novel, The Penitent, he writes: ‘I’m still as bewildered and shocked by the ...”

“... resource. What is true of folded arms is also true of a more commonplace gesture, the handshake. Herman Roodenburg suggests that the handshake only took over from more ceremonial forms of greeting around 1800: in Britain first, then in Holland, France and Russia. In his Memoirs, written in the 1790s, Casanova describes a ‘shake-hand amical’ bestowed on ...”