“... Johannesburg, one can never forget, is a mining town. There are physical reminders – great pyramids of spoil from the mines litter the landscape – but more entrenched is the psychology of the mining town. People usually come to Johannesburg because there is money to be made here and they often go as soon as they have made it. The crassness of the place is, roughly speaking, Texan – South African golfers playing the American pro circuit tend to live in Houston, another skyscraper city in the middle of nowhere ...”

“... 267 to 225. Carter and Clinton (twice) could not have gained office without the black vote; indeed Johnson in 1964 was the last Democrat to win a majority of the white vote. He used his victory to push through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, observing that this meant the Democrats would lose the South for a generation to ...”

“... In his account of D-Day Antony Beevor comes to many surprising conclusions: that the Germans were by far the better soldiers, more experienced, disciplined and confident; that their weapons were generally better, not just the Tiger and Panther tanks and the 88mm anti-tank gun but even their MG42 light machinegun, which was far superior to its British and American equivalents; that the Allies shot many prisoners and committed all manner of atrocities; that French civilians caught in the middle often suffered more from the Allied onslaught ...”

“... Bill Deedes is justly celebrated as a nice man and an English archetype, the sort of character Ian Carmichael used to play in Ealing comedies: Woosterish, emollient, never standing on his rank, always accepting Tory family values – usually expressed more forcefully by a fearsome, chauffeur-driven auntie figure, as played by Margaret Rutherford, or, in Deedes’s own life, by Margaret Thatcher ...”

“... I was in the Harare headquarters of the Movement for Democratic Change when news came through that two boxes of uncounted ballots had turned up in Buhera North, the constituency in which the MDC’s leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, had been narrowly defeated by his Zanu-PF opponent a few days before. I asked Tsvangirai what he made of this. ‘Well, it means we can apply for that election to be declared null and void too ...”

“... Growing up in Durban in the 1950s, I could see how keen Coloured and Indian cricketers were, how much everything was tilted against them and, at the same time, how good white South African cricket was. Take the schoolboy generation I saw rising around me. Playing against Hilton College, I came up against Hylton Ackerman and Mike Procter – the latter opening both the batting and bowling at the age of 13 – while at Durban High School the opening pair of Lee Irvine and Barry Richards had century or double-century partnerships every week; it was impossible to bowl to them ...”

“... breaking all records with LBJ. This third volume takes us only as far as 1960, with the whole of Johnson’s Vice-Presidency and Presidency still stretching ahead, yet this volume on its own contains 645,000 words and the first two, The Path to Power and Means of Ascent, were each of similar size. Mainly this is justified, for LBJ’s career, from the young ...”

“... Cape Town is in a state of serious dislocation because of next summer’s football World Cup. The huge new 68,000-seater stadium at Green Point is virtually complete but there are roadworks everywhere, as the city tries to fulfil its public transport plans on time. Except that there is now no hope that it will, because it has belatedly discovered that the vaunted Bus Rapid Transit system, which was supposed to cost 1 ...”

“... An Aids epidemic is coming to South Africa. The countries with the highest Aids incidence in the world are grouped in East-Central Africa – Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda and Malawi are probably the greatest sufferers of all – and gradually the virus has been making its way southwards. It has indeed been possible to work out South Africa’s ‘HIV prevalence lag time’: nine years behind Burundi, eight behind Tanzania, Uganda and Malawi, seven behind Zaire, Zambia and Rawanda, five behind Kenya and Angola – and so on ...”

“... In December 1940, Ben Macintyre’s anti-hero, Eddie Chapman, was in jail in Jersey – he already had a long record, including everything from safe-breaking to blackmail – when the Nazi occupiers threw a young hotel dishwasher, Tony Faramus, into the same jail; Faramus became Chapman’s cellmate and friend. At Chapman’s suggestion they both offered to spy for the Germans, essentially as a way of getting themselves out of jail and away from Jersey ...”

“... I am not a superstitious man and indeed I should not greatly care if I were never to be PM,’ Neville Chamberlain told his sisters, still in mourning for his brother, Austen, ‘but when I think of Father and Austen and reflect that less than three months of time and no individual stands between me and that office I wonder whether Fate has some dark secret in store to carry out her ironies to the end ...”

“... the state-encrusted flummery of Black Rod, the Mace and the Queen’s Speech, are quite dead: the rows about the handling of the sacred Mace are really to do with the blasphemous disturbance of a corpse.Eugen Weber amends Marx to say that when revolution repeats itself, it becomes not tragedy or farce but tradition. Looking at what is planned for the ...”

“... is liable to jeer when the occasion arises. When De Gaulle ordered US bases out of France, Lyndon Johnson angrily demanded to know if that meant digging up the graves of American soldiers who had died in the liberation. Jacques Chirac’s refusal to support George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq caused fury in Middle America, in part because it was felt that ...”

“... Reading this Life of Lloyd George is like watching one of those old James Cagney movies where it’s established early on that the protagonist isn’t simply an anti-hero but, for all that he’s lionised, an irredeemable villain. The fun comes from watching him get away with all sorts of caddishness early on and then carry on the virtuoso act long after everyone has got his number ...”

“... There is an old​ Pathé News clip of Attlee being interviewed on the stump in 1950. He has so little to say that the interviewer, in some desperation, asks, ‘Have you anything to add, prime minister?’ to which Attlee replies: ‘No, I don’t think so.’ The idea of a modern politician turning down such a soundbite opportunity makes one sigh ...”