“... in Mile End because the markets were better over there, but at least Westfield was near her now in White City. She was 31. ‘I was born in Egypt 11,426 days ago,’ she told one of her neighbours, pleased with the new app on her iPhone that could count days. Rania was a great fan of Snapchat, she posted there every spare minute she had, and on Instagram and ...”

“... spy is treated as simple fact, as is his claim that FDR’s most trusted adviser. Harry Dexter White, the founder of the IMF and the World Bank, was also working for the Kremlin. The intellectual level of the book is perhaps best illustrated by Pincher’s laborious attempt to construct a mathematical equation to explain treason. The equation, in case LRB ...”

“... couldn’t possibly have been a lover. His massive pipe was scarcely [sic] out for a start – the White Cottage carpets reeked of pipe tobacco for twenty years ... he hadn’t that ‘mind’s recoil upon itself’ which makes possible passionate uncertainty, the loss of all gravity which goes with falling in love, the giving-of-oneself, the abandon. He was a ...”

“... would have to decide whether it was genuine or a plant. In 1953, the hawkish congressional staffer William Borden, convinced that Oppenheimer was a Soviet agent who had obstructed the development of thermonuclear weapons, prepared a 91-page ‘top secret’ history of work on the hydrogen bomb to set out his case. He entrusted extracts to the Princeton ...”

“... done by a graduate student, which began with an authoritative statement: ‘The work of William Shakespeare was evenly matched with many other authors in Elizabethan and Jacobean society, but modern opinion emphasises his importance as the finest playwright in Western culture.’ Modern opinion can now at last be seen to be false. But where shall we ...”

“... Russia himself. The only secure option would be to ask his host and friend, the British ambassador William Hayter, to send Dr Zhivago to London in the bag. This might explain how the Foreign Office was able to copy the typescript onto two rolls of microfilm and hand it over to MI6, which in turn delivered it to the CIA, with dreadful consequences for ...”

“... your life culturally reflected, it may become the template for adult aesthetic experience. The white suburban boy-child of the 1950s playing cowboys and Indians could invisibly rehearse all-male dramas. The one who got excited when the Indians won was already on the path to dissidence. There’s one cultural artefact discussed in the book that isn’t an ...”

“... and it is here that her life becomes Technicolor again, no more subtle Acoma pots or black and white piano keys. Instead there are parrots and toy planes and floors of raked dazzling sand and heroin for him, now on and now off, and more and more drinking for her. The memoir ends with the unfinished sentence: ‘Buddy lay curled up and shaking violently on ...”

“... I feel certain, got it more quickly. ‘How long were you in Vietnam?’ he was asked in 1975 by William Heath, who later edited Conversations with Robert Stone (2016). Heath’s flat question was impossible to ignore. ‘Just a couple of months, something under three months,’ Stone said, ‘which is, I admit, not very long, but all I can tell you is every ...”

“... timid. They resemble nothing so much as nervous Victorian dabblings with Mr Sludge the medium. A white-coated psychologist was in attendance. Huxley’s main contention is that ‘religion and alcohol do not and cannot mix.’ Mescalin is ‘much more compatible’. Thousands of eager ‘experimenters’ subsequently took their trip through the magic ...”

“... has been largely successful). But the first festival was cancelled after only one screening (William Dieterle’s Hunchback of Notre Dame): Hitler had just invaded Poland. Two days later, France declared war on Germany. In 1946, backed by a socialist mayor, Raymond Picaud, and funded by the Confédération Générale du Travail (which still sits on the ...”

“... The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and justified the hideous war in Vietnam. Cold War liberals themselves, with the kept conservative journalist Joseph Alsop they formed a Three of Hearts in the less fastidious quarters of ...”

“... concealed. Many names are redacted, and some pages have been removed in toto and replaced with a white sheet on which is stamped this grammatically unappealing message: ‘THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENT RETAINED IN DEPARTMENT UNDER SECTION 3(4) OF THE PUBLIC RECORDS ACT 1958.’ Section 3(4) allows for the retention of a record for a ‘special reason’, which does ...”

“... only ones among her critics who got her remotely right. They included Chris Patten, John Patten, William Waldegrave and Tristan Garel-Jones, and were soon to be joined by John Major. In the pamphlet they used as an epigraph a line from Macmillan: ‘We have at least the most important thing of all at the head of our government, a prime minister of ...”

“... the Falklands invasion but he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mrs Thatcher to stay in office. William Whitelaw has written that he wanted to resign as Home Secretary after an intruder had entered the Queen’s bedroom in Buckingham Palace, but that Mrs Thatcher would not let him. Jim Prior unsuccessfully tried to resign as Northern Ireland Secretary after ...”