“... a decade, met its political goal of pre-empting a similar initiative pushed by Senator Edward Kennedy, but as a technical achievement left much to be desired. It was simply premature in the Seventies to hold any realistic hope of addressing the fundamental nature of cancers, since the necessary biological methods were only just then being ...”

“... But many conservatives (Bennett among them) thought that Stanford’s President, Donald Kennedy, had caved in too readily to radical ‘intimidation’, and a number of journalists were excited by images of blacks lynching Western Culture. The lay public had also been made aware at around the same time that something sinister called Deconstruction ...”

“... this fine biography. Mary Kingsley was the daughter of George Kingsley, the younger brother of Charles. The DNB gallantly falsifies the date of George’s marriage, which was only four days before Mary’s birth. His wife (thought to have been his cook) was a competent businesswoman and, unexpectedly, a good shot with a revolver. Mary learned from her the ...”

“... he created for himself were, in general, slices of his legendary life. Leo (Design for Living), Charles Condomine (Blithe Spirit), Hugo Latymer (A Song at Twilight) are all smooth, successful writers. Garry Essendine (Present Laughter), George Pepper (‘Red Peppers’ from Tonight at 8.30) and Elyot Chase, a man of no apparent metier in Private Lives who ...”

“... closed meeting held late that year, the US Ambassador to Britain (and former RKO executive) Joseph Kennedy bluntly warned Hollywood executives to stop making such movies, citing the possibility that any subsequent American entry into the war might be blamed on Jews. This, he suggested, was even now happening in Britain. The line soon went public. Addressing an ...”

“... with (of course) his cousin, Sidney Gluckstein, in acquiring a run-down building company from Mr Charles William Bovis. Bovis is a name to conjure with in this story. Some of the conjuring was done by Keith Joseph himself, who liked to tell of how a multi-million-pound construction business had been founded on little more than ‘a horse and cart, a ladder ...”

“... of the Western allies and the substantial egos of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Field Marshal Montgomery and General Patton. Dad thought Eisenhower was a man with ballast, a leader. But the Finnegans wanted to argue Ike’s policies.Note the trace of red-baiting in the bit about the steel company (‘un-American’); the ...”

“... represents a sufficient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril,’ John F. Kennedy told the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. ‘Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a ...”

“... the late 1960s: racism, riots, the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Russian troop movements, the liberalisation of communism in Czechoslovakia. Where she comes from informs what she sees. After Bobby Kennedy’s murder, she makes a list of ‘Attempted and successful assassinations ...”

“... instead a continuing struggle is variously played out between politicians such as Jack Lynch and Charles Haughey, the conservative Church and the women’s movement, or (less convincingly) the ‘big, mad children’ on both sides in the North and the grown-ups. The opposition is clearest in the contrast between Haughey and Garret FitzGerald. FitzGerald ...”

“... old standard poodle Charley as company. It was election season, as it was this September: Nixon-Kennedy. Steinbeck was 58, younger than the Maestro and myself, and near the end of his life. One can feel it in his writing. He was a smoker and drinker and on his third marriage. He had had a couple of minor strokes. In two years he’d be awarded the Nobel ...”

“... nominally Syrian territory but is currently controlled by Isis. In the view of the historian Hugh Kennedy he wasn’t a significant political actor, but ‘at best an adequate caretaker of what he had inherited. Nor was he a great patron of culture: he left virtually no surviving architecture and it was his son and eventual successor, al-Mamun (813-33), who ...”

“... who make many species are the “splitters” and those who make few are the “lumpers”,’ Charles Darwin wrote in 1857 to his friend, the great botanist Joseph Hooker. This first recorded appearance of the handy distinction between those who bundle up the data into one big theory and those who prefer to lay out the exhibits on the table in carefully ...”

“... about keeping its plans secret from Washington. Some Americans, including Senator John F. Kennedy, already supported Algerian independence. Oil and gas had been found in Algeria, and French intelligence had discovered that American oil companies were in correspondence with an FLN leader, Ahmed Ben Bella, about possible oil leases. This was more than ...”

“... money came from the Foreign Office via the External Services of the BBC – an idea suggested by Charles Curran, the Director-General of the BBC. The External Services did indeed use Reuters material, but they paid over the odds for it and the high payments amounted to a concealed subsidy. Looking back later, Gerald Long, Reuters chief executive from 1963 to ...”