“... calls this the standard ‘quagmire school’ approach to the Vietnam War, led by people like David Halberstam and Arthur Schlesinger. The problem is that a close scrutiny of classified documents will not bear it out: ‘For Kennedy, as for Johnson, in fact, it was the President who was deceiving the public, not his subordinates who were deceiving ...”

“... by Mrs Thatcher but now wholly outmoded.24 October. Judy Egerton sends me Among Booksellers by David Batterham. Batterham is a second-hand bookseller and the book a collection of letters to Howard Hodgkin from the places, some of them quite far-flung, where book-buying has taken him. There are letters from Spain, Finland, provincial France and even ...”

“... Ghanaians, Communist Party etc.’ There wasn’t much truth in these claims. ‘At its height,’ David Gibbs writes in The Political Economy of Third World Intervention (1991), ‘the communist intervention in the Congo comprised no more than 380 Soviets and Czechoslovaks – against 14,000 UN troops and many thousands of Belgian military ...”

“... remaking society according to their lights.In 2022 the billionaires William Oberndorf and David Sacks, former COO of PayPal, pumped money into a successful recall campaign against Boudin, shortly after his election as district attorney. A total of $7 million was donated to the effort, 80 per cent of it in amounts of $50,000 or more, $600,000 from ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... it wants it to be, making the whole play some sort of expiation. I often read and reread Anthony Powell’s Journals where a recurring theme is the stupidity and bad behaviour of journalists by whose crassness Powell was always unsurprised. So no change there. 26 May. Do a question and answer session at Warwick Arts ...”

“... an argument made in the private sector’. The few NHS hospitals of architectural interest, like Powell and Moya’s general hospital in Swindon, disappeared after less than forty years. The best surviving buildings, it seems from Harwood’s account, are the private houses that architects built for the wealthy or for themselves, which appear in Davies’s ...”

“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”

“... Guardian. He said it would come from journalists he’d worked with there. He was obsessed with David Leigh and Nick Davies, two of the main reporters. ‘Davies is extremely hostile to me,’ Assange said. ‘The Guardian basically double-crossed the organisation in the worst way.’ (The Guardian denies this.) ‘We left them with a cache of cables – to ...”

“... whatever side they preferred in the ensuing campaign, in which Tony Benn from Labour and Enoch Powell from the opposition – he had by then left the Tories and joined the Ulster Unionists – campaigned for a No vote. In June 1975, on a turnout of 64 per cent, two-thirds of those who voted – 67 per cent – approved the deal Wilson had obtained. British ...”

“... asked by the Foreign Office to become the United Kingdom’s special representative on Cyprus. Sir David – now Lord – Hannay, who began his career in Iran and Afghanistan, was Britain’s foremost European diplomat, with some thirty years of involvement in EU affairs behind him. His summons came from Jeremy Greenstock, soon to become famous for his ...”

“... More Cecil Beaton?’ Norman showed her the book he was looking at, this time something on David Hockney. She leafed through it, gazing unperturbed at young men’s bottoms hauled out of Californian swimming-pools or lying together on unmade beds. ‘Some of them,’ she said, ‘some of them don’t seem altogether finished. This one is quite ...”