“... biographers, assumes that this was his final farewell to the mountains and lakes of Austria. But William Dugdale, in his recently published memoir, Settling the Bill, describes being deputed to organise a Fourth of June dinner in an orchard by the banks of the Wörthersee.* Sixty or seventy Old Etonian guards officers were invited to sing Floreat Etona and ...”

“... of the Iron Lady. It struck me then that no one had done such systematic damage to the North since William the Conqueror. This produces squeals of delight but they’re not enough to persuade me to say it on TV.Deaf with (and these days even without) my cold, I hear a mention of the Stone Roses on the radio as Cold Moses which, as the name of a group, would ...”

“... and anything, including remaking society according to their lights.In 2022 the billionaires William Oberndorf and David Sacks, former COO of PayPal, pumped money into a successful recall campaign against Boudin, shortly after his election as district attorney. A total of $7 million was donated to the effort, 80 per cent of it in amounts of $50,000 or ...”

“... it wants it to be, making the whole play some sort of expiation. I often read and reread Anthony Powell’s Journals where a recurring theme is the stupidity and bad behaviour of journalists by whose crassness Powell was always unsurprised. So no change there. 26 May. Do a question and answer session at Warwick Arts ...”

“... Reader’s Digest with the harder-edged ideology of the National Review, founded by the wunderkind William F. Buckley in 1955. The new right-wing consensus involved a shift from isolationism to militant interventionism, whose advocates were ‘even willing to risk nuclear war with the Soviet Union to liberate the “captive nations” of Eastern ...”

“... and, separately, from the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, whose boss, General William Westmoreland, had the Shakespearean sounding title of COMUSMACV. (In the flesh, Westy came over more as a hard-driving business executive.) On one busy day in the flourishing Saigon black market I bought an American fatigue uniform, boots, jungle hat and ...”

“... the Viet Cong, who had clear-cut grievances and aims. As Bush’s secretary of state, Colin Powell, said: ‘The enemy is in many places. The enemy is not looking to be found. The enemy is hidden. The enemy is, very often, right here within our own country.’ Such comments encouraged a nightmarish atmosphere of permanent and inescapable crisis, with ...”

“... the New York society hostess Muriel Draper, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Nancy Mitford, Dawn Powell, even Mary McCarthy, whose rivalrousness towards other intellectual women is legendary. The fact that Murphy seems to have been one of the kindliest people on earth no doubt only magnified her attractiveness. Though lacking scholarly training (like ...”

“... feared concerning it, or something like that.’ ‘Enoch’, as she invariably called Mr Powell, had got it right and she wrote him several letters telling him so, but in the absence of a wholly congenial party she founded her own, the Fidelis Party. ‘It will be a party caring for Justice (and as such not needing opposition). Justice in the world ...”

“... and Silvio Berlusconi. Ten Egyptians were reported to have been killed by armed men in Tobruk. William Hague, who had condemned the repression the previous day (as had Hillary Clinton), announced at a press conference that he had information that Gaddafi had fled Libya and was en route to Venezuela. The Libyan ambassador to Poland stated that defections ...”