“... Hong Kong. A clever scholarship boy of Irish ancestry who grew up in West London, he shares with John Major a modest show-business background – his father published a pop hit, ‘She Wears Red Feathers and a Hooly Hooly Skirt’. ‘We were low-to-lower middle class. I can describe these gradations with laserlike accuracy,’ Patten told his New Yorker ...”

“... over the function of the old British Empire, and that after the Suez debacle Britain was tied to Washington with an umbilical cord made of piano wire. Very soon after I came, there was a general election. Harold Wilson had replaced Hugh Gaitskell as leader of the Labour Party and was soon to become prime minister. I canvassed for Labour in 1964. At Private ...”

“... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...”

“... vides was published in 1974, which is late for the scholarship pupil plot in Britain and Ireland. John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the ...”

“... the New York Time. My own story in the Guardian, which would normally have been reprinted by the Washington Post, was ignored. Not until I had written a detailed account for the Nation did the mainstream American press finally admit, a year later, that US intelligence agents had been present in Bolivia on the last day of Guevara’s life.For half an hour or ...”

“... forward at the end of his book took place.Earlier that year, hailing Obama’s inauguration in Washington in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, he set out the global context, updating his conception of the Modern Man’s Burden:Obama makes America more powerful. The ability to cast the national interest in terms of a universal mission is deeply embedded ...”

“... That’s what he said without prompting, and on the Wednesday evening he had a conversation with John Barradell, the City of London’s extremely well-connected town clerk. Barradell has what you might call a leading interest in the operations of London Resilience, the set of protocols that go into action during a major emergency in the capital. At this ...”