“... the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff for nearly a decade. What he felt about Philby’s betrayal may only be imagined because he kept his thoughts to himself and rarely – perhaps never – mentioned Philby’s name again. Morley​ tells the Philby story in both his books, and he tells it well. But he makes no serious attempt to weigh its full impact on ...”

“... of Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), battered rugby league player Arthur Machin makes what may or may not be his final appearance on the pitch. Knowing that for him the ‘game’ (in more than a sporting sense) is up, he looks beyond its claustrophobic mayhem at the ‘life’ not yet ‘absorbed’ into it: at ...”

“... last point was. In the absence of ground troops, or even the threat of ground troops, an enemy may move freely among civilians and do its worst. That is more or less what happened. The KLA, where they mattered at all, were powerless to tie down the Serbian security forces and distract them from atrocity, as a proper infiltration of Nato ground troops might ...”

“... ideas he hears people talk about. When Rumsfeld formulated the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war in May 2002, Woodward reports that the secretary of defense heard from a friend that the notion of pre-emptive war ‘went back centuries’ and that Sir Thomas More had written about pre-emption in Utopia. This is true: More did write about the ...”

“... The tension between party members and elected representatives, however, is congenital in Labour: Richard Crossman observed in 1968 that the nominal sovereignty given to the party conference was vitiated in practice by the freedom given to MPs in matters of political judgment. Perversely, the unremitting attacks from his own MPs made it more difficult, not ...”

“... it would be Post’s fault when a communist uprising began in a ‘saturnalia of violence’ on May Day 1920. He foretold mass assassinations, the storming of government buildings, rivers of blood. It was excellent copy for the newspapers, but they turned against him when the day passed like any other. No President Palmer. Warren Harding campaigned on his ...”

“... corps of like-minded Vietnamese, one a history teacher fascinated by Napoleon, Vo Nguyen Giap. In May 1941 at Chingshi in South China they founded the League for the Independence of Vietnam, Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh, or for short, Vietminh. (Vietcong, ‘Vietnamese Communist’, was a dismissive label invented in Saigon that the VC themselves never ...”

“... Richardson, and he sang David’s praises. ‘He’s the ideal playwright. Never says a word.’5 May. Angels in America opens at the National. When I saw the original production at the Cottesloe in 1992 I found I was sitting behind Derek Jarman. I knew Derek slightly since he had been in the adaptation of Orton’s Prick Up Your Ears, and I knew, too, that ...”

“... but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester ...”

“... else could the art historian E.H. Gombrich be transformed by a feat of necromancy into his son Richard, and suddenly appear as ‘a distinguished Orientalist’? What other magical city could induct a wizard of Johnson’s calibre and pack him off to France to discover Jean-Marie Le Pen’s followers celebrating their Welsh origins (‘nos ancêtres les ...”

“... would have been fascinated by the scientific methods that enabled the recent identification of Richard III’s bones and would not have been surprised that the remains of the last Plantagenet king should be discovered beneath a Leicester car park. ‘Grave-stones tell truth scarce fourty years.’ Nor should we bet on the posthumous survival of our ...”

“... extended essay, unfinished on his death in 2003 – the pages about 1944-45 have been written by Richard Neustadt. There is much to be gained from Jenkins’s insights but Patrick Renshaw’s study, though equally succinct, is much more substantial. Renshaw is a specialist in American economic and labour history, and, as might be expected, his book has most ...”

“... this assumption has been frustrated. Writing in 2004, five years into devolution, the historian Richard Finlay noted that ‘for all the talk of Scotland being more radical than England and of the nation being predisposed towards left-of-centre redistributive policies, these characteristics have not really manifested themselves in any meaningful ...”

“... 34 seasons, were dedicated to the subject. Buckley argued on air that however kindly Ho Chi Minh may have seemed in the 1940s, the sheer number of Vietnamese people seeking refuge from repression south of the 17th parallel surely justified US intervention on humanitarian as well as anti-communist grounds (this argument proved influential on the human rights ...”

“... there would be inflation. One must wait for economies to right themselves. (‘Is it your view,’ Richard Kahn asked Hayek when he came to Cambridge to explain his theory in 1931, ‘that if I went out tomorrow and bought a new overcoat, that would increase unemployment?’ ‘Yes,’ was the reply. Keynes, although he greatly disliked Hayek’s argument, saw ...”