“... front-liners who actually lived through or died in that ‘abyss of blood and darkness’ (Henry James). In one of his most telling sequences, Fussell reported on a visit to the Somme. Finding it, in the early Seventies, ‘a peaceful but sullen place, un-forgetting and unforgiving’, he tried to conjure some picture of what it might have been like, day by ...”

“... his 1948 book The Other Side of the Hill (a quotation from the Duke of Wellington, who told John Wilson Croker that he had ‘spent all his life guessing what was on the other side of the hill’). This was military history from the opposing army’s perspective and with the politics and ethics left out. General Sir Percy Hobart, the most cussed of the ...”

“... are in no sense to be taken as endorsing the immobilism they associate with some aspects of the Wilson and Callaghan administrations. That sentiment is also prominent in the minds of those who have been drafting policy documents and making conference speeches for the Social Democrats. It is to be seen, for instance, in the emphasis placed on freedom of ...”

“... served alongside us. The United States was, at the time, preoccupied with Vietnam, to which Harold Wilson declined to commit British troops. The Borneo campaign was won largely by our domination of the immediate area of the border with Indonesia. There were a series of operations across the border to attack Indonesian military bases and communications. None of ...”

“... seems these days) perpetual government, a feat achieved by neither Clement Attlee nor Harold Wilson and not even attempted by the Party’s only other postwar premier, James Callaghan. Blair has skilfully contrived his views to appeal to that section of voters which determines the outcome of British general ...”

“... Texas fraudmeisters, a disaster locked into place by Davis’s Republican predecessor, Pete Wilson, whose advisers are now clustering around Schwarzenegger like flies in a privy. Davis hardly helped, renewing the corrupt contracts and allowing Texas corporations to sell California’s energy back to California at an obscene mark-up. Last ...”

“... between Proust, Mann, Gide, Genet, Forster, Woolf, Stein, Langston Hughes, Djuna Barnes and Henry James, it may be more accurate to say that the modernist novel is a queer invention with a smattering of heterosexual imitators, many of them notably preoccupied with queer concerns. After the war, the mantle was passed from Vidal, Isherwood, Baldwin and Capote ...”

“... presence described Siraj and his nobles as ‘crafty, devious and venal’. In 1817, however, James Mill, in his History of British India, deplored the ‘plotting and intrigue’ that deposed the nawab, and subsequently, in a gesture of reconciliation, an obelisk put up by Holwell to commemorate the deaths was removed. But by the 1840s the mood had ...”

“... in Britain. The Report on a Highway Plan for Glasgow, produced by the consultant engineers Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick for the corporation in 1965, is extraordinarily bold. The city centre – in the report, a dense, slum-ridden, sooty horror – has been evacuated and encircled by a vast motorway on stilts. At Charing Cross, apart from the Mitchell, everything ...”

“... the name of Thatcher to reverberate round the planet. As I know from close-quarters experience of James Callaghan on Devolution, Ted Heath on the miners and Michael McGahey, Harold Wilson on Rhodesia and Harold Macmillan on Profumo, occupants of 10 Downing Street can come to see the world in highly personal and in ...”

“... of whether or not BP smoothed Aliyev’s ascent to power is ‘a bit of a red herring’, says James Marriott of the campaign organisation Platform, co-author with Mika Minio-Paluello of The Oil Road (2012), the authoritative account of the company’s dealings in Azerbaijan. ‘The important point is how BP helped form a state that would assist in meeting ...”

“... since when did that really matter in crime fiction? – and sternly says that P.D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh, for example, ‘lacks verisimilitude as a policeman, if not as a person’. He also says rather oddly that ‘stories about a criminal, no matter how excellent they are in their own right, can never be as attractive as stories about a ...”

“... in an extended household with his family, his staff, and his lover and business manager, Jack Wilson. He was one of a number of homosexual men, among them Ivor Novello at Redroofs near Maidenhead, who found in a country house a way of living which, if it was not exactly open, was much less constrained than it would have been in Teddington. Tinniswood ...”

“... was more practical: he included useful remarks about sites and materials, and suggested his own St James Piccadilly as a good, economical model. But the two architects agreed on many things, in particular that the new churches should stand free and not be crammed into the tight, built-up corners many City churches occupy.On the whole the Commissioners followed ...”

“... one that includes Melville’s Benito Cereno, Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock, a letter from Ignatius Sancho to Laurence Sterne, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha – show that such books do exist. Still, she asks about J.M. Coetzee’s Foe: ‘Why not ...”