“... MacArthur won his many medals – relatively brief exposures, with MacArthur picking when they took place, buoyed by adrenalin and his public role – more closely resembles the courage needed by the war correspondents by whom he was usually surrounded in the field. A different kind, seldom recognised by medals or publicity, is asked of those who, when ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first ...”

“... or ‘neo-authoritarian’, what is indisputable is that it has unleashed what John Ganz has called a sense of ‘moral anarchy’, in which there are no longer any limits to the expression of sadism, or to its implementation as policy. Children are forcibly separated from their parents. Migrants from Venezuela are flown to a concentration ...”

“... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...”

“... The trial​ of Argentina’s military leaders took place in Buenos Aires between April and September 1985. The court heard evidence against the nine most senior figures in the regime, including three former presidents – Videla, Viola and Galtieri. Sittings began each day in the early afternoon and often went on until after midnight ...”

“... which characterised the period of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Furthermore, its emergence took place ‘in the margin’: that is to say, outside the customary academic and intellectual writing centres in the United States. The Language Movement deliberately eschewed those centres and developed its own audiences, avenues of communication, and organs ...”

“... attack’, and by preferring, of the various accounts of Christian given by the survivor John Adams on Pitcairn, the one which is unfavourable. Christian’s Pitcairn was, of course, no more a paradise than Bligh’s Bounty. There were Tahitian women on Pitcairn, but not enough of them, and the results were another, bloodier mutiny and Christian’s ...”

“... it with six thousand urns containing urine. Floating irresistibly back come recollections of John Nance Garner, Vice-President of the United States, describing his own job as ‘about as much use as a pitcher of warm piss’. John Nance Garner, where are you now that we need you? The bizarrerie that pleases me most is ...”

“... left – Frank was both intellectual and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in the Spanish Civil War. (The present title, Beyond the Frontier, nods towards Stansky and Abrahams’s 1966 Journey to the Frontier, a reworking of the lives of Cornford and Bell.) Immediately after ...”

“... given way to Bebe Rebozo. Watergate scattered this group in all directions (including jail) and it took some imagination to believe that much the same group would take over power again just six years later – but this is exactly what happened. Reagan re-installed such Nixon stalwarts as Haig, Shultz, Weinberger and Casey, while Ed Meese and Larry Speakes gave ...”

“... more than a potted biography, fleshed out with some not very revealing ‘exclusive’ interviews. John Ardoin is the major authority on Callas, who in Callas (with Gerald Fitzgerald, Thames and Hudson, 1974) and The Callas Legacy (Duckworth, 1977), has forged the most detailed and balanced account and critique of her career to appear to date. With this ...”

“... I begin to realise that the courage Trimble displayed at the peace talks, the great risk he took there, has given a significant section of the Unionist community a new imaginative charge. It would be sentimental to say that the spirit of those 18th-century Presbyterians is behind the words of the News Letter, but something has radically changed here. On ...”

“... worse, it did not warn him to stay out of Switzerland until it was too late. Yet the Department took infinite care to keep its own officials out of the country during the course of their investigations. As a final insult, the EEC forced Adams to accept £20,000 as compensation – which was less than one-fifth of the enormous debts he had ...”

“... around from beyond the grave?) A final credit should be given to the admirable illustrations by John Lawrence, which themselves suggest the interesting precedent of Brisley Le Fanu’s wash drawings to accompany Sheridan’s tales. In giving us an additional, visual register against which to check the ambiguities and intimations of the narrative, the ...”

“... bookish’ (he alludes more than once to his days as a university lecturer in English), took the form of his book less from the river than from other books. His model was the quest-romance, especially in its Renaissance versions, but he borrowed elements from heroic legends of all ages. ‘A journey which had all the essential features of a ...”