“... into its territory. We had missed each other in New York and Los Angeles, but eventually met at Michael Powell’s memorial service. (He said he would probably not have made GoodFellas, but Powell had picked up the script and said how good it was.) Scorsese liked Donnie Brasco very much, pointed out the differences between the two films, and thought I ...”

“... name of Errol Flynn (as star) above two of them, Sabatini was not only a ‘history-teller,’ as George MacDonald Fraser defines his art in a foreword to The Fortunes of Casanova, but one who delighted in a spot of swashbuckling. At the same time he was recognised as a serious historian who had published authoritative biographies of Torquemada and Cesare ...”

“... quite fair. Ms Cunard’s marks are culled from a variety of sources, not the least of these being George Moore’s Ulick and Soracha, whose character Brigit apparently ‘owes the description of her back to the author’s sight of the hindquarters of Nancy Cunard’. For glimpses of the rest of her see Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington (twice), Evelyn ...”

“... think-tanks. The one ‘proof’ she offers for the Kremlin’s strategy is an interview by Michael Ledeen, editor of the Washington Quarterly Review (of the Georgetown Institute) with General Jan Sejna of Czechoslovakia, who defected to the United States in 1968. The General said nothing publicly on the subject of terrorism at the time of his ...”

“... household gadgets to practising law and medicine. Prominent Lebanese Americans like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony ...”

“... by Retrographic: History’s Most Exciting Images Transformed into Living Colour, edited by Michael D. Carroll (Carpet Bombing Culture, £19.95) – is a marker of our level of estrangement. Take Marina Amaral’s brilliant rendering of a photograph of one of Ulysses S. Grant’s councils of war in 1864, the Union command seated on pews carried out into ...”

“... of the Good Friday Agreement is marked at the beginning of April. The Clintons, Tony Blair, George Mitchell and Bertie Ahern were all expected to make an appearance. Recently it seemed that a deal was about to be made. May and Varadkar flew in to Belfast on 12 February, ready to welcome it. But it soon became clear that the talks were in deep ...”

“... rather than by intellectual examination of ideas’. As such it was, of course, heir to Lloyd George’s Inquiries, in the 1920s; its personnel might still have been Liberals had the Liberal Radical tradition survived. Whether social-democrat Tories, in the Harold Macmillan mould, academics or bureaucrats, or liberal men of business and finance, the early ...”

“... Brigham Young build a temple that still stands. Young sent Miles and his son, Miles P., to St George, Utah, where they built a tabernacle and a temple. Young commanded Miles P. to take more than one wife; he took five. He led the Mormon campaign against anti-polygamy laws, was harassed by marshals, and from time to time sent one or two of his wives into ...”

“... Stortford, the market town where Rhodes grew up and where his father served as vicar of St Michael’s Church. Storey, whose grip on Victorian society is a little weak, sees Rhodes as insecure about his status. He was in fact proud to belong to the middling thrusters who amassed capital, joined professions and garrisoned the expansion of the British ...”

“... though inevitably incestuous, family. What if Laura Hunt – Gene Tierney from Laura – met George Bailey, James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life? Thomson treats the film characters as real people with disorienting, almost vertigo-inducing results. So Sally, Susan Sarandon’s wholesome oyster-shucking waitress in Atlantic City, becomes the kid sister ...”

“... necessary to consider his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith’s letters, Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right. Some of the ideas that persistently recur in Goldsmith’s work – opposition to imperialism, scepticism about English notions of liberty – seem to be manifestations of ...”

“... Austen overcomes helplessness, malice and contempt. Fiction had also taken over the sermon. From George Eliot to the present day, bossing the reader about with your own view of things – no longer with the sermon’s universal assumptions – has been the simplest mode of being superior. But of course the form has its own deep ways of compensating for all ...”

“... subject comes up all over the place. Even in élite platoons some sections are better than others. Michael Howard (‘Churchill and the First World War’), F.H. Hinsley (... and the Use of Special Intelligence), R.V. Jones, the happy beam-hunter of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and Zionism) and Roy Jenkins (the ...”

“... advantage of being the first in the field. Since he (or rather, his selfless literary executor, Michael Foot) shook off the chains of conventional Cabinet secrecy and got volume one into print, there have been successors. Every minister knew, at the time when all these notebooks and tapes were being compiled round poor old Harold Wilson’s Cabinet ...”