“... what makes his book especially interesting is how he came to know what he claims to know. He has read everything on the Afghan insurgency and the civil wars that followed, and has been given access to the original manuscript of Robert Gates’s memoir (Gates was director from 1991 to 1993), but his main source is some two hundred interviews conducted between ...”

“... innovate only because they already knew a great deal about what was expected of them. They could read the signals, and decipher the signs, in large public gatherings; above all, they knew how to follow a lead. ‘What is needed,’ Ober writes, ‘is a body of decision makers capable of recognising (through social knowledge) who really is expert, and capable ...”

“... gentleman who told Bathurst about his reluctant withdrawal from the pleasures of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was ...”

“... In one meeting, Woodward reports, Cohn lost his patience with Trump and his favoured economic guru Peter Navarro, who had been reinforcing the president’s view that trade deficits mean America is getting screwed. ‘“If you just shut the fuck up and listen,” Cohn said to both Trump and Navarro, “you might learn something.”’ The only possible source ...”

“... early verse tales, The Giaour (1813), The Corsair (1814), Lara (1814) and others, have long been read as revealing in the worst way – reliant on ‘facile techniques’, uncommitted and unconvinced, marred in their judgments by a ‘fatal distaste for self-criticism’, as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor ...”

“... to put my forty-year-old letters in order, I come across a diary for 1956-59. It’s depressing to read as very little of it is factual and most of it to do with my slightly sickening obsession with, coupled with a lack of insight into, my own character. It’s full of embarrassing resolutions about future conduct and exhortations to myself to do better. Love ...”

“... pre-conference skirmishers were all on the left. The hardly well-kept secret leaked out that Peter Mokaba, the fiery head of the youth section, had had a career as a police informer. Mokaba has become so prominent that it would be embarrassing for the ANC leadership to admit to this, so we suddenly found him cropping up at Mandela’s side to welcome ...”

“... of climatic irregularities – acid rain, the Milankovitch theory, negative feedback loops – read like so many Gothic shockers. Texts as grim as Aids philippics present themselves as cures for cancer. They raise spectres of hope in places where hope cannot live. The age demands its technical primers, its books of instruction. We must prepare ourselves ...”

“... Germany – an action predicated on German defeat and thus treasonable. According to Owings, who read the transcripts of their meetings, to vote in this new state one would have had to be 27 and male. Freya von Moltke believes this is a mistake: ‘I know my husband didn’t think that way.’ Whatever the truth, middle-class resistance groups were often ...”

“... ones, and especially if they agree independently, one must begin by believing them. For instance, Peter Sawyer’s calculation of manpower by number of horses transportable founders on the fact that a minimum number of men are needed even to crew a horse-transporter. As for the nature of Viking armies, Smyth comments drily that too many scholars seem to have ...”

“... Quite a few blue-chip Stalinists are here gently described as ‘left-wing’. It’s odd to read one of them being described as ‘a fiery freedom fighter’ – actually a blustering, hard-drinking tankie who owed me a lot of money. Similarly, the Fifties newspapers, the Guardian and New Age, are described as ‘left-wing’ papers, which would have ...”

“... As English remarks, the Hooker family, and the conflicts provoked by Helen’s headstrong ways, read like the plot of a Marquand novel. It did not have a happy ending, but the beginning was romantic: a runaway marriage in 1935, a house in O’Malley’s beloved Mayo, involvement in Dublin’s theatrical and literary scene, while the publication of On ...”

“... verses, and he/she wants to understand, face this grave on Beeston Hill, your back to Leeds, and read the chiselled epitaph I’ve planned: Beneath your feet’s a poet, then a pit.Poetry supporter, if you’re here to findhow poems can grow from (beat you to it!) SHIT find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look ...”

“... create, to succeed and to greatness. Now a king, now a jester, part Puck, part Palladio, sometimes Peter Pan, sometimes Napoleon, the public and private Lutyens were uneasily juxtaposed: the architect who could synthesise discrepant styles and harmonise spatial dissonances with such unfailing assurance and panache never really got his act together as an ...”

“... Tsvetaeva are none the less very different kinds of poet. It would be possible, even desirable, to read and reread Akhmatova’s complex masterpiece, Poem without a Hero, in a state of complete ignorance about the poet herself, although the poem is full of cryptic intimacies and references to friends and events, both public and private. But Tsvetaeva’s ...”