“... CVs (typically quite selective) onto the narrative in a clumsy appendix. The contrast with William Taubman’s biography of Khrushchev – to take an obvious parallel – is painful.1 Taubman started out much more explicitly than Vogel with the intention of studying his subject from the angle of his relations with the US, but became so imaginatively ...”

“... that’s the articulate part, and the mass, the proletariat, is a great senile toothless hairless white ape, blind, tied, etcetera.’ America, where he was happy with Plath, he describes as ‘glazed’, ‘boundless suburbia’, ‘plastic cellophane’. He is severe on Larkin, saying of his prose miscellany, Required Writing, that ‘the whole book’s ...”

“... point of all discussion, was inculcated by 19th-century Orientalists: the translator and scholar William Jones called Kalidasa, the greatest Indian poet and dramatist of antiquity, the ‘Shakespeare of the East’. To do this, Jones had to reverse history – Kalidasa preceded Shakespeare by more than a thousand years. Jones is not so much making a useful ...”

“... concentrate the universe in themselves,’ the Chilean liberal Francisco Bilbao complained after William Walker’s 1856 invasion of Nicaragua, where he brought back slavery years after it had been abolished: ‘The Yankee replaces the American; Roman patriotism, philosophy; wealth, morality; and self-interest, justice.’ When Washington attempted, at the ...”

“... A painting​ in the National Portrait Gallery offers a grey-white face, long, guarded, medieval, remote: ‘unknown woman, formerly known as Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury’. It is painted on a dateable oak panel, and the dates suit the presumed subject, but the artist is anonymous. Where is Hans Holbein when you need him? The sitter might as well be carved, for all she suggests flesh or circulating blood ...”

“... won’t expect British soldiers to act as beaters for their driven grouse shooting, as Prince William did at Balmoral in 2016. Even so, Taymouth shows again that the fundamentals of land ownership and control have been only minimally affected by land reform.Taymouth Castle is a proto-Balmoral that foreshadowed in taste and sensibility the version of ...”

“... are there, including John Ford, Rouben Mamoulian, Robert Mulligan, George Stevens, Robert Wise, William Wyler, Billy Wilder. Hitchcock sits next to Buñuel, says very little, then at one point puts an arm round his companion’s shoulder and says with deep admiration: ‘Buñuel, that wooden leg in Tristana. That wooden leg.’Buñuel and his wife Jeanne ...”

“... you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific, said he was the greatest soldier in American history. Never much regarded in Britain, he is still recalled with loathing in Australia. When Americans remember him, it is with something close to ...”

“... There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his waist. The olive-coloured Avon ripples ...”

“... have a former Arab population.’ Zionist propaganda about Arab refugees, said the Jewish writer William Zuckerman in 1958, ‘has literally succeeded in changing black into white, lies into truth and serious social injustice into an act of justice, praised by thousands.’ Evidently, the process continues.Apart from Arabs ...”

“... This movement, exemplified by names like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, SF’s sturdy dead-white-guy canon, is where a fascination with technology and the future became mashed up with American exceptionalist ideology: technocratic triumphalism, Manifest Destiny, libertarian survivalist bullshit. Hard SF fuelled both the Cold War space race and Ronald ...”

“... man’, of ‘Through the Night’, the first section of which ends: ‘The pale green leaf clings white to the lit night/and shakes a little on its stiff, tense twig’ (where only the word ‘little’ is not a monosyllable). I find him browsing along the seam of self and world, like a painter, or like a European poet, not unlike Montale or Pasternak, the ...”

“... and cannot even advance a weaker claim to connoisseurship because my favourite English Iliad is William Wyatt’s 1999 updating of his great-uncle A.T. Murray’s 1924 version, because of the Greek text on its facing pages, because of the handy Loeb format well suited to air travel (and to cheap replacement when left aboard), and for its literal yet stylish ...”

“... have these three nights sat up with him from the apprehension of his dying,’ he wrote to William Haslam two days before the end. ‘Dr Clark has prepared me for it – but I shall be but little able to bear it – even this my horrible situation I cannot bear to cease by the loss of him.’Severn meant no harm in packaging those five months with ...”

“... the mistake of appearing to be America’s surrogate in Europe; he, at least, never fawned on the White House. Heath is the nearest thing This Blessed Plot has to a politician-hero; apart from Roy Jenkins the other heroes are the usually unsung civil servants: Lee, O’Neill, Robinson, Butler, Palliser etc, who shepherded us into the Community with a skill ...”