“... such nonsense, nor, when confronted by Widdicombe’s at least equally simplistic demands, will William Hague. The fact that Labour has now loosed itself from its traditional moorings and restraints is visible, too, in the growing sleaze chronicled by Tom Bower. Although Bower has concentrated his efforts on Robert Maxwell and (the intimately ...”

“... Twenties. It is hard to believe, as you drive from the West Side down 125th Street en route for Kennedy, that it was ever a glamorous place. It is now generally thought to be dangerous; drivers lock their car doors at traffic-lights and dread the ‘squeegee merchants’ – I daresay that trade, so irksome to Mr Straw, had its origins in New York City. But ...”

“... her.It should be noted that the party was held two weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, such boozy antics somewhat dissonant in what was for most Americans a joyless holiday season. Yet what appears to have peeved Kazin was something closer to home: the crass spectacle of chums and colleagues gloating over their ascendant ...”

“... US Senate; wrote 17 more novels; lived to memorialise (in essays in this book) his friends John Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Italo Calvino, Orson Welles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anaïs Nin ... In this kind of summary Vidal’s life sounds almost comically glamorous and eventful. One of the secrets of his social and professional success lies in the combination of ...”

“... At the general election Tony Blair explicitly claimed to be moving beyond Thatcherism and William Hague implicitly claimed to be moving back to it. During the campaign it was difficult to be sure what image best captured the brooding presence of the eponymous Lady. If she appeared to the Tory faithful as a painfully nostalgic evocation of the glory ...”

“... power of banks and other sinister financial interests. Half a century or so after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, around 60 per cent of Americans still dissent from the official verdict that a lone gunman was responsible, though there’s no consensus about the identity of the conspirators: variously the Mafia, the CIA or Castro’s Cuba. In the ...”

“... Thorpe was educated at Eton and Oxford, where he defeated Dick Taverne (later a Labour MP) and William Rees-Mogg (later the editor of the Times) for the Union presidency. Like one of his successors as Liberal leader, Charles Kennedy, he became an MP at a young age and came to public notice through his entertaining ...”

“... within the consulting room. There is a story, though, from his years of fame, that when Edward Kennedy came over from Hyannisport to consult him about running for President, Erikson asked him to think about what kind of old age he wanted. He had at first been doubtful about the whole psychoanalytical milieu, so ‘intensely verbal’ as he described ...”

“... Corvo), C.P. Snow and Virginia Woolf. There are also allusions to other texts, such as William Golding’s Free Fall, and to literary schools and sub-genres: the Chester-Belloc style of essay writing is caricatured in Egbert Merrymarsh, and there is a postgraduate sherry-party scene that was supposed to be a kind of distillation of the post-Amis ...”

“... around now that’s any good, either, which is to overlook not only the work of such writers as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem, but also Ronald Moore’s remake of Battlestar Galactica, a TV series that’s as intelligent, nuanced and unflinching an examination of the United States’ post-9/11 militarism, foreign policy and relation to the un-American ...”

“... fallout, he spoke out forcefully in defence of atmospheric testing, so much so that President Kennedy was under the impression that Teller thought a little extra radiation was good for you. At the same time, Teller’s enthusiasm for all things nuclear spilled over into a series of fantastic plans for the ‘peaceful’ use of these devices. In secret ...”

“... held the attention – the text of the man, not of his art. As the writer and war correspondent William Walton said to Denis Brian, ‘a man who has spent all his life inventing fiction keeps on inventing it in his private life.’ The reaction started with the publication of Death in the Afternoon in 1932, the hero of which, as Kenneth Lynn cogently ...”

“... Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious above’), the Scottish-born English MP who ended his life as Governor of Bombay; Thomas Olivers (‘The God of Abraham praise’), a ...”

“... The schoolmaster William Johnson is remembered for three things, although not under that name. He wrote the most famous of all translations from Greek lyric verse, ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead’; he wrote the words of the ‘Eton Boating Song’; and in a letter to Francis Warre-Cornish, another Eton schoolmaster, he wrote of his pupil, the future Lord Rosebery: ‘I would give you a piece of plate if you would get that lad to work; he is one of those who like the palm without the dust ...”

“... and SDP founder Roy Jenkins or the Americans Telford Taylor (later a Nuremberg prosecutor) and William Bundy (a Kennedy security adviser). Never a communist, he felt emotional solidarity with the Soviet Union as an ally and was indignant if anybody criticised Soviet actions (‘Oh, the Poles!’). Sisman doesn’t ask ...”