“... Anthony Holden’s is the 16th book about Laurence Olivier, and his foreword tells of two more biographers, John Cottrell and Garry O’Connor, too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the Sussex countryside, still swimming occasional lengths of his pool in the altogether and attending the first nights of the three children who have followed Joan Plowright and himself into the theatre ...”

“... relatively short volume is not so much a biography of Crossman – that is to be provided by Anthony Howard – as a portrait of someone he clearly loved. But it is a long way from being the misty-eyed picture of a faultless hero. Black Tam o’the Binns has a reputation to maintain as a man who puts truth and objectivity before mere ...”

“... A year later, he favoured adopting an election pledge to ‘Keep Britain White’. Also that year, Anthony Richmond argued in The Colour Problem that the public could be divided into three camps: ‘extremely prejudiced’, ‘mildly prejudiced’ or ‘tolerant’. He suggested that ‘most people think others more prejudiced than themselves’ and that ...”

“... and Ernest Bevin when they tried to discuss postwar domestic reconstruction, or from the Tories Anthony Eden and Duff Cooper, who told him that after the war Britain would find the leadership of Europe there for the taking. Over five years, Churchill’s abilities as a strategist were tested and he sometimes failed, but he was triumphantly successful in ...”

“... bad planning. If only the administration had listened to the conscience of the military, General Anthony Zinni, and had deployed more men at the start; if only the postwar planning had been more considered; if only Rumsfeld had delegated the planning for the occupation to someone other than Douglas Feith, described by General Tommy Franks as the ‘fucking ...”

“... described a bibulous evening at Number Ten that autumn, when Churchill told his foreign secretary Anthony Eden how to deal with the troublesome Egyptians and other Arabs: ‘Rising from his chair, the old man advanced on Anthony with clenched fists, saying with the inimitable Churchill growl, “Tell them that if we have ...”

“... I decided I would stop concealing that myself.’ On 1 October 1969, aided by his Rand colleague Anthony Russo and using a primitive Xerox machine in the office of Russo’s friend Lynda Sinay, the owner of a small advertising agency, Ellsberg began his monumental task. Working through the night, he and his friends would copy 47 volumes of the Pentagon ...”

“... where she intended to remind Reagan of some hard political truths. Her principal aide, Charles Powell, drafted a memo in which he laid bare the core of the argument she would need to get across to the president (the emphasis comes from Thatcher’s annotations of the text): You will cause me very real political difficulties if you pursue your proposal for ...”

“... how we arrived in our current situation, with three centrists – Biden, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell – undertaking an experiment in economic policy of historic proportions.In the 1970s Krugman belonged to a generation of young lions at MIT, then the pre-eminent economics department in the US. The prevailing model at MIT was the so-called neoclassical ...”

“... sophisticated poems versed in the Anglo-American tradition, dedicated to the likes of Mark Strand, Anthony Hecht and Susan Sontag, and aimed primarily at a circle of readers in London and New York. (He has evidently succeeded in that aim: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just bestowed on him its ‘Genius Award’ – $250,000 with no ...”

“... and loyal at the same time, giving a great deal to his family while also possessing what Michael Powell called ‘the innocence and cunning of a child’. Where Gielgud’s double life was single-minded, Redgrave’s was chaotic; his psychology was more modern, just as his acting was more intellectual and his sense of the theatre more political. This alone ...”

“... murder. After Macmillan’s death in 1986 an independent investigation led and largely paid for by Anthony Cowgill concluded unequivocally that, in the words of one of his team, Christopher Booker (who had originally believed that Macmillan was culpable), ‘Macmillan’s part in the story was (a) marginal at best, and (b) that he actually knew very little ...”

“... and we hadn’t even seen the famous ‘Teacher’ ad on TV.9 February. News of the death of Enoch Powell brings back memories of my only two meetings with that remarkable man. On the first occasion he came to talk to an academic dining club at the LSE and (as I recollect it) trounced his left-leaning discussants pretty decisively. When he arrived, the West ...”

“... and first Bush administrations, including Gates, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Armitage and Powell, all bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees and 10 million unexploded land-mines that followed from their decisions. They must also share the blame for the blowback that struck New York and Washington on 11 ...”

“... Wright for ‘yielding too little of the roadway to a white man as he passed in his wagon’. Anthony Crawford rejected a ‘white merchant’s bid for cottonseed’. Mary Turner was ‘lynched with her unborn child [it was cut from her belly and murdered] for complaining about the lynching of her husband, Hayes Turner’. There were 11 more lynchings in ...”