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“... the artlessness of all love-letters. ‘Darling, what fun it must be to build a bridge, a great steel bridge, with giant girders, like a God’s meccano outfit.’ Like many biographers, Sherry might be suspected of a spot of schadenfreude at such moments, but perhaps it is Greene who has the last laugh: authorising their publication may have been a kind of ...”

“... horse chewing? he asks, What does it chew? The black horse is biting a bit forged from steel a bit of memory to be champed on champed on until death. If the boy who gave me the short mint were seven years older, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine why he might join Hamas, ready to sacrifice his life. The weight of the smashed concrete slabs and ...”

“... one will not find much in either Michael Leapman’s sympathetic and readable portrait, or John Cole’s lively and good-humoured canter over the events of the last decade, to change one’s mind. The nature of the Labour Party’s – and Kinnock’s – problem was vividly illustrated by what happened when James Callaghan resigned the leadership late ...”

“... Front’s 168 candidates secured an average vote of 8.9 per cent. During a Commons debate in July, John Stokes, the Conservative MP for Halesowen and Stourbridge, a former admirer of General Franco and a supporter of the Monday Club, pointed to the growing constituency for the National Front and insisted that ‘a date must soon be fixed beyond which no ...”

“... year, was between 16.4 and 29.5 million. Because the whole nation’s effort was concentrated on steel production, the full harvest was not brought in. The number of those who died in this self-induced famine was equal to the total population of Scandinavia. Mao’s calamitous experiment (which was opposed at the time by a number of those who had formerly ...”

“... brown murk’ of the Humber – ‘To north and south, a scanty shoreline welds the rusted steel of estuary and sky’ – welds the supposed opposites of nature and industry (and the rust is a reminder that industry is not immune to nature, that the destructive effects work in both directions). Also on board the Volunteer, under Captain Arthur ...”

“... spearmen, total victory, the Black Prince winning his spurs and, by the end of the year, both John II of France and David II of Scotland safely locked up in the Tower of London awaiting ransom. Mission accomplished. Except it wasn’t. Sumption takes us on through the chevauchées – the large-scale mounted raids that the English used to weaken and ...”

“... the nation was brainwashed into seeing the Crystal Palace as a ‘Temple of Peace’. John Tallis, in his guidebook, observed that ‘peace was on every lip’, and not, as one would expect, the Victorian equivalent of ‘Wow!’ Jeffrey Auerbach is much occupied with charting such changes in aspiration and emphasis. His book is less concerned ...”

“... who took over the company when her husband shot himself in 1963. It was Philip Graham who induced John Kennedy to choose Lyndon Johnson as his running-mate in 1960. This was wise and far-reaching advice, for without Johnson on the ticket Kennedy would not have been elected. Consequently, without Graham’s intervention there might never have been a Johnson ...”

“... I have never read a life like John Fuegi’s of Brecht. Revisionism doesn’t begin to describe it. This is dartboard stuff, effigy abuse, voodoo biography. If Fuegi could get inside the Dorotheenfriedhof, uproot Brecht’s jagged scalene headstone, dig through six feet of Brandenburg sand and a zinc coffin, and do something to the remains involving chicken heads, inverted crosses and black candles, I don’t doubt that he would ...”

“... of characters throughout his career. But to claim that Shaw is both the central characters in John Bull’s Other Island, and three of the major figures in Heartbreak House, is to stretch the notion of the factual original beyond snapping point. Further, the autobiographical model obscures other particularities of the Shavian dramatis personae. There ...”

“... the Birmingham Six, and the old decencies seem perilously contingent. To take one actor in Annan. John Buchan – in some ways a key figure of politics and culture in 20th-century Scotland – appears as a straightforward inter-war Tory, a somewhat archaic consensus-monger tainted by Appeasement. Seen from the north, he is much more ...”

“... that is the best he can do. Seven years after his father’s death, the poet and novelist John Burnside stumbled almost incidentally on the facts of his early life. Talking to his mother’s sister, he learned that the elder Burnside – ‘Tommy Dick, or George McGhee, or whatever his name was’ – had been an abandoned child, found, by whom is not ...”

“... and town. Millions of pots and pans were hurled into primitive furnaces to make ‘backyard steel’. But by mid-1959 it was clear to many of Mao’s colleagues that the Leap had stumbled badly: a combination of waste, incompetence and attempts by local officials to enforce wildly unrealistic targets. Mao had already sent members of his entourage to ...”

“... Valley, or the backward provinces of Mexico, or the banana plantations of the Caribbean, or the steel plants of Ukraine, or the coffee plantations of Kenya, by the fact that the visiting reporter cannot be a man or woman with a pencil or a camera, but is always a representative of the West. The West is now seen as an imperialist force by most people in the ...”