“... the angst of ambition and failure were softened by a valedictory glow. With O’Kell, this sort of cross-referencing becomes an end in itself and sometimes falsifies both the politics and the fiction. Disraeli himself never took all his novels seriously (he later tried to suppress Vivian Grey and The Young Duke); yet O’Kell seems unable – or unwilling ...”

“... But he wanted to say something; his silence was being noted. ‘Where is Mr Graham Greene?’ Anthony Powell asked in a review of Authors Take Sides. So in December 1937, Greene published an article in the Spectator called ‘Alfred Tennyson Intervenes’. He recalled that what was happening now wasn’t the first instance of its kind. A hundred years ...”

“... Howard, the poet and journalist who is Miles Malpractice in Vile Bodies and ‘two-thirds’ of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited (the other third, Evelyn Waugh said, was Harold Acton). Howard is now best known for a single hateful phrase (‘anybody over the age of thirty seen in a bus has been a failure in life’), which is a pity, because the new ...”

“... of evidence from former prisoners as well as organisations like Amnesty International and the Red Cross which proves conclusively that human rights abuses are routine under Israeli occupation. The only report Black and Morris choose to quote is that of the Landau Commission appointed in 1987 to investigate the Shin Bet’s techniques in dealing with cases of ...”

“... diplomat and a hard taskmaster: descriptions of his tantrums with his staff resemble those told of Anthony Eden, just as loose talk around the Kremlin about assassinating Sadat shortly after his succession to Nasser is reminiscent of Downing Street talk about Nasser in 1956. The author is perhaps most interesting about Russian attitudes to the Chinese. He ...”

“... morality – the morality that privileges and circumscribes a single idea of sexual relations. Cross-cultural and trans-historical comparisons, comparisons which make it possible to characterise the still obscure features of our – possibly changing – sexuality, tend to compound this relativism. For a brief period the struggle for liberation from the ...”

“... spaces. Along with half the country I followed the trial this spring and summer of Casey Anthony, a young Florida woman who went clubbing after her daughter disappeared, and told police the girl had been abducted by a nanny who turned out not to exist. The toddler’s body was found off a suburban drive called Suburban Drive, and whatever happened to ...”

“... and roundly accuses Mrs Thatcher of deliberately sabotaging the peace efforts of Mr Haig and Sir Anthony Parsons. In a letter published in the Daily Telegraph on 10 January 1983 he alleged that the Prime Minister had ‘spurned an honourable peace and for her own political purposes opted for a military solution’. Central to Mr Dalyell’s thesis that Mrs ...”

“... menacing of a succession of ‘Tudor Rebellions’, to quote the title of a seasoned classic by Anthony Fletcher (1968), recently revised by Diarmaid MacCulloch and reissued (1997). But in the perception of the actors this was not rebellion at all, and when they found themselves described as rebels in intercepted government bulletins, their fury almost ...”

“... at least, as a political journey, had become an elopement. Some gunboat diplomacy followed. Anthony Eden, then foreign secretary, sent a cable to the consul in Bilbao asking him to ‘FIND JESSICA MITFORD AND PERSUADE HER TO RETURN.’ Mitford was made a ward of court and nearly lured onto a British destroyer (which would have whisked her back to ...”

“... only made all things without them jar But in their breasts raised up a civil war. According to Anthony à Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses, and Sidney Lee who follows Wood in the DNB, Order and Disorder is the work of Sir Allen Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely accessible’, now easily accessible in David Norbrook’s modern spelling ...”

“... of Never on Sunday and Psycho, in which, occupying a long floaty number, she prowls up to Anthony Perkins, perching beside him to croon. ‘What’s it about?’ he asks. ‘Like all Greek songs, about love and death,’ she replies. ‘I give you milk and honey and in return you give me poison.’ The museum was deserted. The entrance fee had ...”

“... years in London, the move to Paris, the involvement in the Resistance, the work for the Irish Red Cross at the end of the war, the partnership with Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, the struggle to become a writer, and, of course, the attainment of ‘fame’. Cronin writes with considerable charm, though he also has a taste for blarney and cannot resist the ...”

“... Bradford where he has been making a programme about the decline of the city. I note that at Kings Cross, unlike me, he goes home by Tube, whereas after the rigours of Nidderdale I feel I’m entitled to a cab. Still, as Anthony Powell used sometimes to note in his journal, ‘interesting day’. 7 July. The same week as I ...”