“... As the ‘intelligence war’ escalated, it was left to officers from MI6, in particular Michael Oatley, to find a more constructive approach, and he conducted secret back-channel talks with Catholic priests, the Derry businessman Brendan Duddy, and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin. After Mountbatten’s murder in August 1979 and the killing, hours ...”

“... to’, browbeating, placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of the TUC has in it some wonderfully revealing passages on these (and other) periods: none so rich as the gathering of 1 June 1969 at Chequers which brought together Wilson, his First (and Employment) Secretary Barbara Castle, Jack Jones ...”

“... drinking. When the book opens she is compulsively monitoring a Facebook post by a woman called Taylor Birch, who has revived an accusation of sexual assault against a former high school teacher. Taylor first made her allegation more than a decade earlier, when she was 14, but this time people are listening. The accused ...”

“... They don’t, in themselves, ‘mean’. It is we who mean, by them.In just this spirit, Gary Taylor’s Re-Inventing Shakespeare offers a lively ‘cultural history’ of our use of the Bard. In fact, he proposes a new discipline, somewhat clumsily dubbed ‘Shakesperotics’, whose field is more or less everything that a culture gets up to in the name ...”

“... Lincoln and King transformed these figures in national memory from trouble-makers into healers, as Michael Eric Dyson puts it in I May Not Get there with You, an attempt to bring King back to political life. But while Lincoln turned in his last months from racial justice to national reconciliation, King had been moving in the opposite direction at the time of ...”

“... later, repeatedly ‘brought party disunion and electoral defeat’ (in the words of A.J.P. Taylor, who was to become the Beaver’s favourite historian). In Taylor’s definition, ‘Imperial Preference … meant in practice British tariffs on foreign food, while foodstuffs from the Dominions came in free.’ There ...”

“... court. Most significant is the clandestine relationship she embarks on, early in the novel, with Michael Agnew, a middle-aged, married, Protestant barrister, which leaves its damning traces – the dirt of his car smeared on her hands and face, his scent on her body. She, like the other characters, makes her way by learning to read the signs, scanning faces ...”

“... don’t explain why Rawls and Dworkin and others wrote what they did. Those of us who, as Charles Taylor put it in Sources of the Self, ‘feel particularly strongly the demand for universal justice and beneficence, are particularly sensitive to the claims of equality, feel the demands to freedom and self-rule as axiomatically justified, and put a very high ...”

“... to understand for himself – and so do the journalists who write about him. Or most of them. Michael Wolff never planned to write a book about the president just as Trump never planned to become president. Wolff remained uncertain about his book’s prospects in the days leading to its publication in mid-January, though things began to look up when he ...”

“... erzwungene Krieg (a war forced on Germany) to explain Nazi aggression. In Germany itself, A.J.P. Taylor has found few if any disciples. But even if a shadow of doubt hung over the question of Germany’s responsibility for the war, there was none whatever about her conduct of it. Goering and his co-defendants at the Nuremberg Trials made hay of the highly ...”

“... all others to awe-struck silence. On domestic politics Lord Beaverbrook and his acolyte A.J.P. Taylor gave us plenty to be going on with, even before younger specialists like Cameron Hazlehurst began to dissect the minutiae of Cabinet crises. Arthur Marwick boldly opened up the whole question of war and social change. Recently a number of younger ...”

“... with Tom Driberg, the well-known Communist who later became Chairman of the Labour Party and, on Michael Foot’s special plea, a Labour peer. Driberg, an active undergraduate Communist at Oxford, was closely associated in politics with A.J.P. Taylor, who himself travelled in Russia in the 1920s, where he met the Bolshevik ...”

“... tell you anything you’d want to know.’ (One interrogator told Pieslak that he tried Michael Jackson on Iraqi detainees, but ‘it doesn’t do anything for them.’) One can imagine other dissonant forms of music – serial music, or free jazz – being equally effective. But not many military interrogators listen to Schoenberg or Stockhausen ...”

“... be felt, five of the six men who were ambushed and shot were unarmed at the time; and a sixth – Michael Tighe, shot dead in the barn – had no paramilitary connections. John Stalker’s special brief was to determine the involvement of the RUC in these events. One of the most disquieting revelations made in the press has been the degree to which the ...”

“... executioners claim to believe in it too, any more than you find Morocco unpleasant just because Michael Portillo drops in on the place occasionally. In Orwell’s view, it was the Stalinist Left that had betrayed the common people, not democratic socialists like himself. Orwell first encountered Stalinism in the squalid betrayals of the Spanish Civil ...”