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“... country – Churchill most obstinately of all. Guy Burgess was one of those – James Klugmann and John Cornford were the chief – who helped to induct me into the Party. We belonged to the same college, and hence to the same ‘cell’. I remember Burgess as a rather plump, fresh-faced youth, of guileless, almost cherubic expression. I heard him spoken of as ...”

“... Weight puts it in the first subheading of his introduction: ‘Amphetamines, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker’. Which is a nice phrase, even if it’s half-inched from an interviewee in a previous book, Jonathon Green’s flawless oral history of 1960s counterculture, Days in the Life. (In fact Green also used it as a subheading. This feels a bit ...”

“... a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of those not infrequent war heroes who in peacetime are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in ...”

“... citizens (mostly Chechens and other North Caucasian Muslims) have joined the caliphate. The downing of the plane in Sinai by an IS bomb was fresh in Russian minds. But other groups also posed a threat, and it made little sense to distinguish between jihadi groups and so-called moderates on the battlefield. Idlib city, for example, is held by Jaish ...”

“... Kouchner’s horror over killings perpetrated in Kibagabaga (near Kigali) the day after the downing of Habyarimana’s plane. Using the testimony of UN officers and some very helpful maps, Péan makes the case that the murders, which Kouchner used as propaganda for the FPR, may have been committed by the FPR itself. Kouchner’s explanation for the ...”

“... collapse of the aristocratic system: servant trouble, death duties, new money, Ramsay MacDonald in Downing Street. Never such innocence again. If the Souls are remembered at all it is partly because some of their number – Arthur Balfour, George Curzon and Wyndham – enjoyed major political careers, and partly because they generated an abundance of ...”

“... Palace to watch the Changing of the Guard, then went to look at the glossy black door of 10 Downing Street for the first time. For lunch, she ate what she fancied – salad, cheesecake and not one, not two, but three glasses of bitter lemon – and for once had not cooked any of it. Then she bought a plastic policeman’s hat and a Union Jack flag on a ...”

“... of near misses, such as when Louis, the French Dauphin, was offered the English throne after King John’s death and was cheered through the streets of London before being defeated in the Battle of Lincoln in May 1217 and then the Battle of Sandwich in August, perhaps the first ever battle fought by sailing ships in the open sea.Even the fiasco of the last ...”

“... a commodity squandered as I had never known it before. 22 May. Reading Frank Kermode’s review of John Haffenden’s life of Empson makes me regret a little that Empson was cut out of The History Boys. In the first version of the play Hector sings the praises of Sheffield where he had been taught by Empson, then recounts to the boys wanting to go to Cambridge ...”

“... rather Buñuelesque) by Duff C. and Lady W. being so middle-aged and ultra respectable. John Julius Norwich puts his father’s sexual success down to his ability to write bad sonnets to his lady-friends but one wonders if it was a more basic attraction. The moustache is hardly a plus, the photograph on the book jacket making him look like a 1940s ...”

“... Office agitated for foreign-language broadcasts to counter the propaganda of the Axis powers. John Reith, the director general, felt obliged to accept an arrangement that, as Potter puts it, ‘included agreeing that news editors would accept specific guidance from civil servants as to which items needed to be included in, or omitted from, different ...”

“... official statistics, half of it from Russia. In the summer of 2012, Cameron entertained Putin at Downing Street, and they watched the judo together at the Olympics. Later that year BP merged with the state-owned Russian giant Rosneft to create the world’s largest oil company, nicknamed Britneft. BP is responsible for one sixth of dividends in British ...”

“... economic and social policies which were explosively incompatible and which eventually did for John Major’s Government, and a reckless ‘re-engineering’ of the country’s social structure which ultimately went disastrously wrong for the Tories. She brought into being a middle class which, it turns out, has no overriding loyalty to the Conservative ...”

“... Authority, and pledged the UN to play a ‘vital role’, as requested by the White House and Downing Street, in helping it out. Condoleezza Rice and Powell had already chosen the functionary in the Secretariat they wanted for the job, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, its human rights commissioner. Vieira was reluctant to go, but an audience was arranged with ...”

“... in the weeks before issuing his inquiry appeal Callaghan had been in frequent phone contact with Downing Street. Might he not already have known, when issuing his appeal, that Mrs Thatcher would turn it down?) Wilson, of course, did speak at the time of MI5 and BOSS plots against him, but age and ill-health seem to have reduced him to a state of bland ...”