“... if the President wills it. He may consult his Secretary of State on foreign affairs or, as Woodrow Wilson did during the First World War, ignore him utterly. Cabinet officers serve their Presidents. They meet as a group if he wants them to: they see him when he calls them. Nixon said to Haldeman, ‘Keep’ em out of here, Bob,’ and Bob did just ...”

“... I am not a travel writer,’ Jonathan Raban said in a recent interview. ‘For me, “travel writer” means someone who samples other people’s holidays – you talk about the food, the hotel, throw in a bit of local colour. If I thought that was the business I was in, I’d slit my throat.’ Bad Land, Raban’s new book about Montana, examines the present remains and historical origins of the last great wave of American western settlement, the migration of homesteaders to eastern Montana in the first decade of this century ...”

“... reaction to Britain’s intention to withdraw from its bases forced Harold Wilson to stay his hand; and Diego Garcia, where a whole island was cleared of its inhabitants to satisfy the needs of American intelligence. As for GCHQ itself, one of the effects of its alliance with the National Security Agency was to focus its attention more ...”

“... up writers?’ There are eight letters from Lojza running through the book from 1942 to 1975. Paul Wilson has translated them into the style of an early school-leaver, complacent and unashamed about his bad spelling and his clichés. Lojza is as funny as the good soldier Svejk. He always expresses loyalty to governments which favour ‘the people’ and ‘the ...”

“... view, though it went ‘unseen and forgotten’, is a striking instance. In the film, directed by Jonathan Glazer, Kidman plays Anna, a crop-haired Manhattan woman whose husband dropped dead while out jogging ten years earlier. She is poised to remarry, when a ten-year-old boy appears claiming to be her husband. Her family is appalled, but Anna comes to ...”

“... introduced herself to Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book jackets. I praised their work, I tried to make an impression, but my talk was seldom ...”

“... than that Morrison would have done no better. So the wearisome catalogue continues with Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan: all men of considerable, and different, talents but hardly characterised by resounding political success; that Gaitskell was never prime minister seems hardly to weigh more or less than Wilson’s achievement ...”

“... magic circle of lobby men, lunching with him at St Stephen’s Club once a week. He saw Harold Wilson every week too, with the other members of the ‘White Commonwealth’, as the handpicked political editors were then called. Yet he did not grow to love or respect these great men. On the contrary, in his book he portrays most of the prime ministers he ...”

“... and leader, yet refused to reduce the size of his army. In 1817, the British officer Robert Wilson pointed out that Russia’s population had grown from 22 million to at least 42 million since 1762. In 1828, de Lacy Evans estimated that Russia’s population was 50 million and would reach 73 million in another fifteen years. Since the 1760s, British ...”

“... professional from another area – journalism, medicine – who stumbles into an investigation. Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware, who appears in Silent Partner and in Kellerman’s earlier novels, like Blood Test, or When the bough breaks, is a Californian child psychologist who meets violence and misdemeanour all over the place, and not just with ...”

“... it may well be the result of a consciously chosen policy. The key event here is the Richard Wilson exhibition of 1982-3, organised by David Solkin, whose thoughtful and carefully researched catalogue attempted to situate Wilson’s landscapes in a range of historical contexts including the moral and political ideas ...”

“... What is it really about, and why was it written like this? The questions are never unreasonable when confronted with works that suggest the possibility of other meanings present beneath the surface level of realism, and when a reader has to decide whether suggested profundities really exist or in fact resemble what Eliot in old age called his notes to The Waste Land, an exhibition of bogus scholarship ...”

“... on Conservative economic policy. One of the most influential of modern Shakespeare critics, G. Wilson Knight, gave his blessing to Britain’s campaign against Argentina on the grounds that it embodied the essential spirit of Shakespeare’s plays. The myth of Shakespeare is also a powerful force for intellectual conservatism: its notion of essential ...”

“... the satisfaction of seeing Dame Edna Everage soar to fame. Other unlikely friends included Mary Wilson (whom he once used to trump the BBC’s religious broadcasting department in a turf war), Ian Fleming and John Osborne. The bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, surrounded by Arab boys, camp churchmen and Beverley Nichols, takes the credit for widening ...”

“... who don’t care to go into a question very deeply. The report had been commissioned by Harold Wilson in 1969, to head off the Scottish nationalists. At the time, Edward Heath was already proposing a Scottish Assembly, but the arrival of Margaret Thatcher on the scene decisively quenched the feeble flicker of devolutionary spirit in the Tory Party. In the ...”