“... is ‘a man of infinite cunning and deceit, a beastly power-hungry egomaniac who is the bearded white double of Amin’. Such comic-strip language is a debasement of the noble tradition of Cuban hyperbole, and its thrust is aborted by Cabrera’s belief that all humanity resembles Fidel: ‘Man is avaricious, vain, and lusting for ...”

“... behaviour might one day, in principle, be generated within the Internet. In The Soul of the White Ant (1937), the South African naturalist Eugène Marais painstakingly documented the natural history of the termites that build terminaries or ‘ant-hills’ on the open veldt. He astutely concluded that the terminary is a ‘distributed organism’: its ...”

“... She also conducted services in the ruined chapel of her mother’s remote Hebridean island, Inch Kenneth, and enjoyed planning her own funeral (her gravestone, chosen by her mother, reads: ‘Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth’). Having stalked Hitler for ages – she would sit at a table in his favourite restaurant, waiting, and shake uncontrollably as ...”

“... America. She was the designer of choice for intellectual and artistic women, the actress Arletty, Kenneth Clark’s wife Jane, and in fiction Muriel Spark’s girls of slender means, who shared one Schiaparelli dress between them. Her influence owed a great deal to the ease with which some, at least, of her work could be pirated, and she took imitation in the ...”

“... he was, despite his reputation as an imperialist brute. Superior Person, the biography by Kenneth Rose, makes little mention of the bons mots, but some of them exist in what Curzon would have cringed to hear called the popular memory. ‘Gentlemen do not take soup at luncheon’; ‘Dear me, I never knew that the lower classes had such ...”

“... But he relives very well the innocence and modesty of those years, of which the hard-nosed Sir Kenneth Berrill, later head of Margaret Thatcher’s Central Policy Review Staff, remarked: ‘We had won the war and we voted ourselves a nice peace.’ As Hennessy himself says, ‘the Britain of the early 1950s, for all the shortages and everyday rubbing ...”

“... prison reformer). After qualifying as a doctor, she went to New York to train as an analyst at the White Institute – ‘a revolutionary alternative to mainstream, orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis’, according to the institute’s official history – under the then renowned Harry Stack Sullivan. Where orthodox Freudian practice focused on the internal ...”

“... texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great moral stain on the American conscience. The view that the ...”

“... visions he entertained. The fiasco over the proposed reforms to trade union law in the 1969 White Paper In Place of Strife may have been the low point of Wilson’s premiership. The TUC eventually gave its ‘solemn and binding’ undertaking to moderate wage demands if the legislation was abandoned. The Economist called the arrangement ‘In Place of ...”

“... eager glint of the spectacles, the unstoppable self-regard in the guise of self-deprecation ... Kenneth Widmerpool! Adjustments made for the Wykehamist rather than the Eton style (Gaitskell, too, had been at Winchester), it has the tone of the power-votary and acquaintance-scraper to a T. The act was kept up until Gaitskell died, and its unfolding is not ...”

“... he thought was a scorching job on William Whitelaw, but chanced to run across him shortly after in White’s Club. The columnist confesses to being horrified. Presumably he would never attack a man he knew he was lunching with next week. But Whitelaw soon has him grovelling, by booming down the club staircase: ‘Hello John. You know, when my wife read what ...”

“... in later centuries. Tragically, a painting often has to shed its frame to retain its lovers. Kenneth Clark, seeking to persuade the Trustees of the National Gallery to purchase Ingres’s portrait of Madame Moitessier, had it removed from the florid gilt composition frame which the artist had probably selected (and possibly even designed) for it, fearing ...”

“... novelist to choose from. He could, for instance, have picked on the investigative journalist John Kenneth Turner, who travelled to Mexico in 1908 and discovered that Diaz’s wonderfully healthy economy was based on massive slavery and the slaughter of the Yaqui Indians. Turner wrote up his findings in a series of slashing articles later collected as the book ...”

“... of depressive significance, perhaps the least convincing of which comes when Arbus chooses a white refrigerator in preference to the presumably more life-affirming salmon-pink or pale green. Such a self-confirming closed circle of biographical method does not do justice either to Arbus’s work or, indeed, to her recurrent depressions. But Sartre’s ...”

“... when he was ten and she was seven: ‘What does she look like?’ he asks. ‘An old lady, white hair, in her eighties,’ I say. He smiles. ‘Everything changes,’ he says, ‘except the dead.’ Elsewhere a Russian dissident reminds us of Bashevis Singer’s Gimpel the Fool, who cannot find it in himself to disbelieve his wife, though all the ...”