“... been a different sort of politician, but that he might not really be a politician at all. When Jonathan Freedland interviewed him recently for the Guardian, he started by asking: ‘Are you a writer who became a politician, rather than a politician who’s done some writing?’ ‘Great question,’ Obama replied.What else might he have been? A law ...”

“... the accusation of abandoning their allies in an hour of need … it didn’t matter if British power derived from the Americans; what mattered was that the British had power to wield, and [Fry] didn’t mind admitting that he rather enjoyed wielding it. For the top echelon of the British army, there was also the ...”

“... Turks of 1908, a complete nonsense. ‘I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews,’ the Foreign Office Under-Secretary Lord Robert Cecil said. Segev quotes a character in The Thirty-Nine Steps airing the common prejudice that ‘the Jew is everywhere . . . He’s the man who is ruling the world just now.’ Although ...”

“... he saw as her growing intolerance of views she didn’t share. Thatcher had used the extraordinary power possessed by a prime minister with a large majority in the Commons to see off her two most powerful ministers. But though she won the battle, she lost the war. Within a year Major, working in conjunction with the new foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, got her ...”

“... York Review of Books (15 January) Shaul Bakhash reported on the increased presence in Teheran of power centres, all of them vying for authority and for better positions in the coming battle for the succession. If we add to this the boasts that have emanated from Israel (Uri Lubrani, the man who supervised Israeli operations in Pahlavi Iran, and who remains ...”

“... of sexual indiscretion in Washington, partly for his own prurient needs and partly for the ends of power. He caused blackmail letters to be sent from the FBI to Dr Martin Luther King, urging him to commit suicide.Historians and journalists have never quite known what to do about these sorts of disclosure. They have never known whether to treat such episodes as ...”

“... coding skills for his intelligence work in China. He remained throughout Mao’s superior, with power of command over him.In 1930 regional tensions in the Red Army base area, over-determined by factional conflicts in the CCP as the Comintern changed its line on China, triggered violent purges of party fighters and militants, ordered or covered by Mao ...”

“... Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of ...”

“... as Roark (Rand was delighted: Cooper was famously right-wing) and Patricia Neal as Dominique. Jonathan Romney, reviewing a 1998 re-release, admired the ‘monumentalist oppressiveness’ of the art direction, then remarked on how strange it was to see the noble Gary Cooper professing not the usual love-of-the-little-fellow tosh, but the joys of the ...”

“... every minute of every day since these events happened … on doing everything possible within our power to nail down the facts.’ The administration’s tone had hardened by 27 August, when Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, told reporters – without providing any specific information – that any suggestions that the Syrian government was not ...”

“... vision of the way the world works. It substitutes the facticity and malign power of a single commodity for the more complex and partly non-factual imperatives of capital accumulation. Almost invariably, this line of argument turns on a plotting of personal connections, Big Oil business networks, and the revolving door of ...”

“... reptiles’ represent George II’s standing army; spreading ‘lilies’ herald the growing power of Louis XV; and, at the poem’s climax, a Hanoverian ‘horse’ (the ‘pale horse’ that would reappear in Shebbeare’s sixth letter) slowly drains the blood of the ‘lion’ of Britain.Johnson could have published the prophecy as a mysterious ...”

“... and Smith’s – disappeared, her English spinsters and clerics were deemed unlikely to sell. Jonathan Cape, Pym’s long-term publisher, summarily rejected Pym’s seventh novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, and she began fourteen long years in literary limbo. Her rediscovery came in 1977. Two influential fans, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, named her ...”

“... negative publicity? Do we think there is any guarantee that a further strengthened institutional power will only be wielded against those whose views and politics we abhor? If we say yes, what picture of power – theirs and ours – does that presume?To which​ a devil’s advocate might say: isn’t that a mug’s ...”

“... presenter tries to gag him – he tells the English about ‘a poem by one of your great writers, Jonathan Quick. This guy in the poem is madly in love with a woman called Celia, but he sees her commode just after she’s had a shit and he can’t take it.’ A broadcast phone call from Mrs Thatcher keeps the Russian monster on the air: ‘If one is dealing ...”