“... to be settled out of court.’ He also thought the Russians were not about to move in the West. Harold Macmillan says he was ‘sceptical about a Russian attack in the West’. Having committed troops from 16 countries, from all five continents, to blocking the unification of Korea under a revolutionary regime, the West decided that it would try to reunify ...”

“... pen, but for those more comfortable with plain writing in English, it began perhaps with William James deriding the ‘copy theory of truth’. This path has been increasingly followed of late; its most widely-read exposition is Richard Rorty’s pragmatism. The will to truth disappears, and is replaced by a desire for more or less satisfactory ...”

“... Mitchell writes of it as hauntingly as John Lee Hooker sang of it. In 1938 Mitchell was hired by Harold Ross as a staff writer for the New Yorker, though his first contribution to the magazine had been published in 1933. He took up with writers like Philip Hamburger, S.J. Perelman and James Thurber, but his best friend at ...”

“... A.J. Stockwell actually begins his valuable essay on authority in the Empire with a quote from Harold Macmillan. Power is illusory: ‘when you achieve it there is nothing there.’ The British of course enjoyed a lot more than nothing. But – whatever ideas or initiatives were devised in the metropolis – the Empire was always in practice made by the ...”

“... way in which the commotions began tends to support the view of, among others, Abraham Lincoln and Harold Macmillan that events are the motors of history, not policy decisions, or, according to Hoyle, the deeper underlying structures, the slowly shifting tectonic plates preferred by Braudel and his school. The unfortunately coincidental presence in north-east ...”

“... as such as ‘could only have been contrived by a poet who had never experienced pregnancy’. To Harold Acton she was ‘the essential hysterical intellectual spinster’ and however unpleasant his tone it is impossible to disagree with his conclusion that ‘dear Edith wasn’t exactly what you might call cuddly.’ As so often it is Sitwell herself who ...”

“... press has any trouble speaking in both tongues, often at the same time. The child killers of James Bulger are ‘evil’, as of course are paedophiles; maybe abuse of the Bulger killers would have counted as a deed of righteous vengeance. In the recent flap over Jon Venables’s reincarceration, op-ed narodniks happily affirmed that he should be held ...”

“... Macaulay and Gibbon, Tom Paine and Cobbett, Hume and Herbert Spencer. They never missed a Harold Laski public lecture. They went in a solid phalanx to hear Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton debate at Kingsway Hall. And they formed an archaeological group to look for relics of Norman and Roman London whenever they happened to have freshly excavated building ...”

“... his advocacy of mostly British architecture, from the Brutalist buildings of the Smithsons and James Stirling, through the Pop designs of Archigram and Cedric Price, to the high-tech megastructures of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, so providing a critical genealogy for these postwar architects as well. Despite his smooth narrative, Whiteley does not paper ...”

“... of George III when trying to fit in another character who was larger than life, namely Charles James Fox. To have given him his proper due would have meant him taking over the play. And so it is with Humphrey Carpenter, my only excuse being that he would have been the first to understand this and to be unsentimental about it. When he turned up on the stage ...”

“... have to satisfy the demands of the all-powerful and long-serving head of CIA counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, who has recently died. The undeniably brilliant Angleton was also at least half-crazy. He saw moles everywhere and had paralysed the CIA for years on end with his frenetic witch-hunting. (One CIA officer wrote a bitter report suggesting that ...”

“... It was​ in a Quonset hut south of the Potomac that Peter Matthiessen met James Jesus Angleton, ‘a cadaverous, hawk-boned man with dark hair, large elfin ears and a lively intelligent face behind horn-rimmed glasses’, as Matthiessen later described him in an unpublished account of his recruitment to the CIA in the autumn of 1950 ...”

“... that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre in Milan’. The Nicolsons were hardly impoverished – they’d ...”

“... on A.E. Housman as a classical scholar or his influential meditation on ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’. In 1940 he published To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, his account of the revolutionary tradition from Michelet through Marx and up to the Bolsheviks. This may look like the one among his works that was wholly ...”

“... earlier positions appear almost unrecognisable. Who, for instance, said the following in 1962 of Harold Macmillan’s stated wish to make Britain a member of the European institutions that had been created by the Treaty of Rome? ‘We must be clear: it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state. I make no apology for ...”