“... entering the mainstream of American life.Bell’s biography is an unusual book, written by a ‘close friend’ (in Bell’s words) and divided into eight parts, named for Stone’s eight novels. Each part relates the genesis, the false starts, the tortured progress, the ordeal of finishing, and the critical and commercial fate of the novels as they ...”

“... life so far as I am able to formulate it,’ he wrote. ‘Comradeship to me so far, an intensely close and all absorbing attachment for my men and boy friends, has been the one guiding principle in my life, and has inspired anything I may have been vouchsafed to accomplish in the nature of the influencing or the building up of character. There may be many ...”

“... on Newsweek when it was discovered that he was keeping files on his fellow journalists. (Like his close associate, Robert Moss, a former Thatcher speech-writer, de Borchgrave is obsessed with the infiltration of the Western press by alleged Soviet moles and has personally briefed President Reagan on the subject.) As early as 1982 de Borchgrave and the French ...”

“... gang, Gennady Petrov, had been a shareholder in the 1990s in Bank Rossiya, along with several close allies of Putin. After he became president, the bank was known as ‘Putin’s wallet’.) MI6 paid for some of Litvinenko’s work: £2000 a month from an unidentified bank account appears in his accounts among the family shopping at ...”

“... him just as well’. Even his closest associates found him hard to read. ‘You keep your cards close up against your belly,’ his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, complained. ‘You never put them on the table.’ Roosevelt played off one adviser against another as a matter of course. ‘Never let your left hand know what your right is doing,’ he told ...”

“... the city, who wanted to start communes in half-dead villages in the mountains, or in empty houses close to the coast. They were talking about vegetarianism and India and the right not to work if you didn’t want to. And others who became diehard nationalists and gathered in Plaza San Jaime on a Sunday evening, proudly doing their national dance in the same ...”

“... America was now the laboratory for a more stringent form of modernisation. Samuel Huntington was frank: ‘democracy,’ he wrote in 1989, ‘is clearly compatible with inequality in both wealth and income, and, in some measure, it may be dependent on such inequality.’ By the time the Berlin Wall came down that November, almost every Latin American country ...”

“... to Graystone, ‘Marshall’s money set the agenda of the Church under Welby.’ (A source close to Marshall said he has no influence on the Church of England or its politics.)Since 2018 Marshall has given £5 million to HTB through the Sequoia Trust, a charity he runs with his wife, Sabina de Balkany, a French-Hungarian antiques dealer, and his ...”

“... much matters: deterrence deterred and deterred both ways. It worked, for example, against plans by Frank Wisner of the CIA to commit paramilitary groups trained in West Germany to aid the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and it made the Russians generally cautious outside their own sphere. President Glafkos Cleridis of Cyprus has revealed that after the first ...”

“... reference to an alter ego, whose biography in a sense we are writing, and to whom we thus come as close as we can. The idea may sound fanciful, but it is pursued with remarkable force and fascination in Richard Holmes’s study. Richard Savage, the young Johnson’s alter ego, was a poor and talented writer whom Johnson had met in Grub Street. Each took a ...”

“... was an impassioned and lifelong militant for the cause of racial equality, and therefore for years close to the Communists. Though never in the Party – even the FBI satisfied itself of this after years of investigation – he was nevertheless (if I may quote my own memories of him) much more than the generic New Deal ‘progressive’ to which Stowe tries to ...”

“... the care of the young of administering corporal correction and providing them with a media for the frank expression of opinion.Corpun’s ‘unique literary service’ actually consisted of pamphlets, often with introductions by eager clergymen, entitled Girl’s Beating: Punishment Postures, which landed him in court, despite his claim to be upholding ...”

“... A Book of New Zealand Verse, there had been only poets who were New Zealanders. In a similar way Frank Sargeson (1903-82) gathered around him a group of determined cohorts who made a distinct New Zealand fiction. There is an un-measurable calculus between what the history of a region requires and the talents of the writers who are called upon to supply ...”

“... two halves, one a history of the firm (with instructive, if unsightly, bar-charts) and the other a close analysis of the editorial formula. This method, as he admits, involves much overlapping. The book virtually ends with the takeover by Harlequin Books in 1971 and only a short afterword touches on the sensational expansion since then, ‘an epic tale worthy ...”

“... example, a not generously staffed and already busy Book Marketing Council, seem insurmountable. Frank Delaney’s notion of a fortnight’s festival in London in the autumn, tied to a BBC 2 book festival, similarly needs to be extended nationally, and so does the newly conceived Edinburgh Book Bonanza, which ran during its Festival. Perhaps the closest ...”