“... public decisions, even Dr Searle’s researches reveal very little. What is striking about Lloyd George’s Boer War charges against Joseph Chamberlain is how much Ll.G could make out of the exiguous materials at his command. A family as deeply embedded in Birmingham industry as the Chamberlains were bound to be involved in war contracting. Reginald McKenna ...”

“... been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (1996) in order to paint a portrait of integrity and rectitude as an exemplar of what was wanting in the Clinton White House. Books about Franklin D. Roosevelt and, above all, Abraham Lincoln have long since become a cottage industry. FDR’s ...”

“... to develop the Penrhyn slate quarry. After his death, the estate passed to his second cousin, George Hay Dawkins Pennant, a fierce opponent of abolition. After the Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833, Dawkins Pennant was awarded compensation of £14,683 for the 764 enslaved men and women that the law no longer recognised as his property. The freed men ...”

“... in it that was petty or vindictive. And what about Dr Johnson’s pal, the awesomely resourceful George Psalmanazar whose fraudulent study of Formosa got him a job at Oxford, teaching missionaries to master his faked-up Formosan tongue? George was made to suffer for his cheek, and in time he did repent – but he too could ...”

“... in a big federal fraud trial the previous day. The federal detective in charge of the case was George Wool, and his deputy was Larry Park. Both men told us how, on the day after Archer gave evidence, they were contacted at lunchtime by a Toronto policeman who said he’d got a suspected shoplifter in the station. The prisoner claimed to be Jeffrey ...”

“... villages, like the one where my parents live, were lassoed by Hampshire North-West, which Sir George Young (Con, obviously) retained in 2001 with a swollen majority of 12,009. Ever decreasing turn-out probably didn’t help Hunter: Basingstoke’s citizens have followed the national trend of not bothering to vote, though they’ve always been slightly ...”

“... probably had more sympathy for army life than most LRB contributors. Here he is, in a review of George Spater’s Life of Cobbett, brushing aside Hazlitt’s remarks about Cobbett’s bullying ways: It is a natural tendency for a sergeant-major to get his way by bullying – both the officers and the men. A sergeant-major bestrides the ranks. He is the ...”

“... and about socialism as the rhetoric of the Labour Party. There was even a hasty attempt to redraw Michael Foot as a moderate, a nice old thing who had had a wild youth, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. This reappraisal, however grotesque, may in part have been motivated by a sudden desire to be analytical and reasonably truthful, after all the intoxicating ...”

“... managed to reveal quite so many things that the [British] government wanted kept secret,’ writes Michael Goodman of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. And yet Pincher believes he never threatened the security of the state – that would be the work of a traitor, which is the way he described Snowden in a recent television ...”

“... One day in 1993, I found myself on a bus in Oxford with Michael Foot. He looked shambolic even by my standards – donkey jacket, stick, long hair all over the place. But nobody minded. You don’t often see leading politicians on a bus and passenger after passenger came up to say hello. He smiled and was the soul of friendliness ...”

“... Disraeli, a miscellany of works which I also passed by, Disraeli not being my favourite man – Michael Foot can have him; Asquith, 600 pages of love-letters to a girl not half his age; Churchill, first of two volumes of biography by an American writer, a disquisition on his political philosophy, and a massive collection of documents relating to his career ...”

“... for reconstructing Europe after the Second World War, named after the US secretary of state, George C. Marshall. Between April 1948, when President Truman signed it into law, and the end of 1951, the European Recovery Programme (ERP) poured more than $13 billion of aid into Western Europe – roughly equivalent to $550 billion as a share of current US ...”

“... were the doubles of the President they served. ‘I am bringing you a playmate your own age,’ Michael Deaver is supposed to have said when he informed the President that his Secretary of the Treasury, Regan, and his Chief of Staff, Jim Baker, were trading places. Struck at their very first meeting by the similarity in their names, Reagan had told Regan a ...”

“... it a sinkhole for imported oil, depleting its economy and distorting international markets. One of George W. Bush’s first major acts as president was to set up a National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG), headed by Dick Cheney. Many observers assumed that the NEPDG would take account of the evidence then beginning to accumulate that oil production was ...”

“... of the same imperial history, it isn’t surprising that one of its most successful governors, Sir George Grey, learned his trade in Ireland; nor that in 1879 the Māori MP Hone Mohi should have declared: ‘I am an Irishman.’ Perhaps it was inevitable that New Zealand would experience something of Northern Ireland’s internecine violence.I am thinking of ...”