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“... Who prizes objectivity? Not Piers Brendon, who has had enough of long ‘photographic’ biographies and is all for ‘the irradiation of an epoch by means of sharp biographical vignettes’ in the Lytton Strachey tradition. ‘The camera’s lens reflects verisimilitude,’ he writes, ‘whereas the prism of the artist’s imagination refracts truth ...”

“... command of his own Administration even if he preferred to govern quietly, by indirection. But as Piers Brendon points out in his engaging biography, the argument that Eisenhower was a clever ‘master of disguise, concealing his political adroitness beneath a cloak of geniality, vagueness, and even ineptitude’ is a curiously substanceless defence of ...”

“... airlines and minerals. ‘The paramount commitment of such organisations,’ according to Piers Brendon, ‘is to profits, and they are disposed to apply only commerical criteria to what is a trust as well as a business. This can warp and dehumanise the organisation of a newspaper and reduce its contents to universally acceptable ...”

“... he was just a ‘scarecrow’, for Lloyd George ‘a great journalistic Barnum’. In 1979, Piers Brendon took this approach further. Sixty years earlier, in Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey had exposed 19th-century mores in four sharp, elegant biographical essays. Now Brendon repeated the trick with Eminent ...”

“... than angry frustration, best expressed by a graffiti exchange on a wall in Jerusalem described by Piers Brendon in The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (2007). Under the Zionist slogan ‘Tommy Go Home,’ one such Tommy replied: ‘I Wish I Fucking Well Could.’ These events are judiciously related by Rose, a professor of history at the Hebrew ...”