“... about the possibility that a former head of MI5 was the agent of a foreign power. Could there be anything more horrible, more unthinkable? Well, yes, according to Charles Higham’s extraordinary biography, there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s ...”

“... According to the careful estimate given here, there was some embroidery in these accounts. By the end of his premiership Lloyd George hardly needed to embroider. The job was being done for him. To Baldwin he was a ‘dynamic force’. Keynes called him ‘this half human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic ...”

“... In its short history, Australia has weathered several storms. By world standards they were minor, but at home they loomed large. The First World War was a rude awakening; the Great Depression hit harder and lasted longer than anywhere else in the developed world; and the Second World War could have been the end of everything ...”

“... to lavish skill and thought on minute particulars, and even if this is less clear than it might be from the plates in Ronald Lightbown’s massive monograph, Lightbown himself has a very keen eye for the subordinate, often tiny things which the artist painted so well, and has industriously inquired into what exactly they were, and also into what they ...”

“... the reach of objective analysis. Is the Castro regime a tyranny which can only perpetuate itself by resort to repression, as the Cuban-American community in Miami and elsewhere insists? Or does it persist, despite the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the deepening economic crisis, essentially because it incarnates a national identity struggling for ...”

“... of course, was preemptively told a couple of years ago in the first volume of her memoirs to be published, The Downing Street Years. But told by whom? There hung over that weighty tome a spectral pall, the result of much collaborative assistance from ‘my memoirs team’. In one sense, however, it did not matter who ...”

“... was leaving a committee meeting when an unknown comrade came up and pressed a letter ‘to be read later’ into his hand. Hannington soon removed the envelope from his pocket, opened it idly, and was astonished to find himself summoned to a secret meeting where all kinds of mayhem and sedition were on the agenda. The note was couched in terms that ...”

“... the Museum’s imposing portico, at the start of a recent survey of national collections conducted by the Museums Journal. The BM is not an exhibition of the nation nor does it incorporate one coherently developed collection. Until well into the 19th century it housed the legacy of the Royal Library, the Classical legacy of ...”

“... or insurance types; and out of their hometowns, incognito, hell-bent on a good time, they can be downright fun, if a little bingy. It’s just that it seems I’ve been in a Midwinter Conference of my own for a long time now. Enough is enough, I need to walk on the beach now and contemplate my next move. My father was a funeral director and three of my ...”

“... astonishment across the continent. So did the thunderous battles, whose scale and drama can still be sensed in the paintings of the Van de Veldes. Yet the wars seem inexplicable within conventional accounts of 17th-century political motive and conduct. From the 1570s, English advocates of a Protestant foreign policy had applauded the Netherlanders’ struggle ...”

“... peace process’. I murmur that the attacks on civilians were unquestionably started by the Israelis and ask what the Government feels about the creation of yet more hundreds of thousands of refugees. The FO chap thinks that none of that is really relevant because the Hizballah are against the ‘peace process’, adding, however, that we are ...”

“... In the mid-Eighties, my family felt everything would be fine if I could just get something with a shirt and tie. My three elder brothers wore nailbags, overalls and aprons – the respective black robes of time-served apprenticeship – but even that world was going by the time it got to be my turn, and it was hoped that I might be found fit for the crisp shirt and tie of the clerical elect ...”

“... does not really ‘enjoy the modus operandi’. How very fortunate the Labour leader is, then, to be able to count on the services of one whose name has become a byword for political manipulation and deviousness. ‘Nobody has brought more professional skill to the debasement of British public life than you,’ Michael Heseltine recently taunted ...”

“... social mobility had already carried them to Labour’s outer limits. At the least, it had to be expected that they and others like them would put their own children in private schools and that the next generation would move away from Labour altogether. What the data suggested was a terrible haemorrhage of talent away from Labour, listless working-class ...”

“... Hopper and Gary Cooper – and the only thing he craved in those Pittsburgh days was the chance to be as lovable as Shirley Temple. The adult Warhol looked as much like death and lived as much by desire. A mobile presentation of 20th-century estrangement. A man in a wig in a season in hell. ‘A sphinx without a ...”