“... he produced was a ‘letter to posterity’ – it was buried in the grounds of his Hampshire home – to mark the wedding of the young Princess Elizabeth. In this, he told future generations how the seeds of social destruction were being sown in his own time by the mass media and the spread of ‘the false, pernicious doctrine that “all men are ...”

“... languages and laws, were not always accorded the respect that their existence reflected on their lord. Rival allegiances were always a problem, and conquest could easily be followed by outright political oppression. Difference from the political elite could very easily be interpreted as inferiority: when habits of dress as well as language or law marked a ...”

“... values and methods developed in the more authoritarian environments of Britain’s colonies coming home to roost. (A high proportion of British secret service personnel had imperial backgrounds.) That such activity was reviled in mainland Britain may, perversely, have aided its development; if it had been more generally accepted it could have been monitored ...”

“... agony, and after eight terrible minutes, Mandrin was mercifully strangled. His career as a crime lord had lasted scarcely a year, but his legend would continue to grow for decades, as ballads, poems, plays and novels about the charismatic smuggler proliferated. The philosophers of the Enlightenment would discuss his case, and some of them would seize on it ...”

“... partisan reporting of the siege of East Aleppo presented it as a battle between good and evil: The Lord of the Rings, with Assad and Putin as Saruman and Sauron. By essentially handing over control of the news agenda to local militants, news organisations unwittingly gave them an incentive to eliminate – through intimidation, abduction and killing – any ...”

“... political climate. The early 1980s, like today, were a bad time to ask the government for money. Lord Hailsham had described the social sciences as ‘a happy hunting ground for the bogus and the meretricious’. It was, as Pearson says, a belief widely held in Tory circles: the social sciences, they felt, lacked rigour as a discipline, producing results ...”

“... the late Georgian politician and socialite, were followed by a life of Monckton-Milnes’s son, Lord Crewe. The latter was the quid pro quo for access to the archives and was, Pope-Hennessy admitted, ‘less than inspired’. Its appearance in 1955, however, started a train of thought in the mind of Crewe’s daughter Lady Cynthia Colville, who had been a ...”

“... to Jewish immigration.If Hecht​ and his Revisionist friends were to find the rescued Jews a home in Palestine, it would be against the wishes of the Arab majority and what Hecht called ‘the sly British’, who were desperately trying to maintain order. In February 1944, the Irgun declared that it was at war with the British; a still more militant ...”

“... him once a fortnight in term for an hour’s discussion on the problem I was dealing with – the home front in the Second World War. It was like being spirited away in a time-machine. To say that he brought the past to life would be true but quite inadequate. What he conveyed was the sense that the past was an unexplored country in which the traveller was ...”

“... reminiscences. Most of the previous biographers – Hilton Brown (1945), Sir Angus Wilson (1977), Lord Birkenhead (1978) – have accepted the Kiplings’ version as literally true. Certainly no one, not even Charles Carrington, who takes a less literal view in his official biography (1955), has ever seriously maintained that Kipling made it all up. Not until ...”

“... human’. Moscow was full of ‘thousands of well-stocked shops’, Robeson’s wife Essie wrote home in 1937, with ‘books everywhere, outrageously cheap ... ’ Robeson told Ben Davis Jr, the black American Communist, that he wished ‘the Negroes in Harlem and the South had such places to stay in’ as the Russian workers’ homes. The Soviet Government ...”

“... blood is poured by experienced hands which do not shake serving up to Messer Domeneddio god and lord  the recycled eternity of his butchered son,  this mouthful of himself alive and warm. This is homoousianus, this is the cup  to catch and keep him in, this is where he floats  in a red cloud of himself, this is morning sun blotting the columns, the ...”

“... many of the other characters, including Sinclair himself in a memorable walk-on (‘a flannelled Lord Longford: on sulphate’), are drawn, kicking and screaming, one assumes, from real life. Some of them I recognise. One or two of them I know. That is Sinclair’s autobiographical bit. Think of Downriver as if Alice had wept a river of tears, rather than a ...”

“... whether his phone is being tapped. In 1980 he concludes (quite fairly) that the ‘club of ex-home secretaries’ is ‘one of the worst features of British public life’. On Any Questions (October 1979), he finds himself commenting on ‘sexual matters’ for the first time – ‘I defended homosexuals and prostitutes 100 per cent.’ He records on 29 ...”

“... West, while the domestic arm of the OGPU stamped out even the suggestion of support for Trotsky at home. Zionism – that is, Jews – became a major enemy in the latter years of Stalin’s reign, and a KGB purged of its Jewish members (the prohibition remains to this day) was sent out to detect ‘the Jew squatting beneath the lot’. It was a mission which ...”