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“... very spirited one, too, as it gathers speed. John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, hits the pages of Michael Jago’s biography, The Man Who Was George Smiley, as a man of whom no one had anything but good to say but who was able to describe himself fictionally as no good at anything at all. He was a patriot, a novelist, a spy-handler, and an early friend of his ...”

“... Figures’, compiled by Carol Brightman, which the reader comes on at the end of the book. Edmund Wilson, one of the Better Known figures, is referred to but has no walk-on part: that marriage is yet to be. Early days with the grandparents in Seattle are mostly a matter of books. Mother and father died of Spanish flu in 1918 on the train on which the family ...”

“... but not the last volume. He’s rewriting his own history. Apparently he didn’t even know Edmund Wilson all that well, and I don’t think Wilson much liked him.’ He said he’d read Wilson’s letters straight through, liked them very much, but still didn’t know why ...”

“... arms to Iraq from Aleppo. Churchill ordered Wavell to clean out the Levant. On 8 June, ‘Jumbo’ Wilson sent another shoestring army over the frontiers from Iraq and Palestine. After a month of far-from-token Vichy resistance, Syria and Lebanon were in Allied control and French soldiers of both sides lay buried in a communal cemetery outside Damascus, morts ...”

“... feel secure amidst adversity is inseparable from his life and death in war. His hero, Woodrow Wilson, also sent young men to die in war (with Roosevelt as his Assistant Secretary of the Navy), and like Lincoln and Wilson, Roosevelt seems to have felt more and more, as the war dragged on, the fate of the wounded and ...”

“... Goldsmith from January 1976 to May 1977. The Eye had been investigating possible links between Wilson and the KGB, using material leaked to them by MI5 – the first evidence of that MI5 subversion of the Wilson Government dealt with by famous Peter Wright. Lady Falkender and ...”

“... More recently, Edward Heath never quite overcame his unease with the press, while Harold Wilson could never wholly hide the peculiar fascination which it held for him. His relations with the Lobby ranged from love affair to stormy divorce. James Callaghan lacked Wilson’s flair as a political news editor but took ...”

“... used being utterly destitute of tone. It would be cheaper, and equally effectual, for Sir Michael to employ a stage carpenter to bang the orchestra door at a prearranged signal.’ ‘Why is it that the Master of Ravenswood, whenever he appears on the stage in the opera, proceeds to fling his cloak and hat on the ground with a melodramatic air? It is ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... exquisitely bound volume from Notting Hill Editions, with a justly amused introduction by Frances Wilson: ‘Few writers have received more applause than Thomas Bernhard, Austrian novelist, playwright and enfant terrible, and few have bitten more sharply the hand that clapped.’ But, still staggering on, the effort continues. James Reidel, who in 2006 ...”

“... however expert, must look elsewhere. Play occurs only in puns: Paula married a man called Michael Hook, and is thrilled to have been ‘hooked, or I was the lucky girl who hooked a Hook’. (Swift seems to choose his characters’ names for this purpose – Harry Beech in Out of This World (1988) spends his childhood summers in Cornwall, ‘The ...”

“... agents, peaking with the claim, assiduously peddled for many years by elements in MI5, that Harold Wilson was or had been in the pay of the Soviets. In 1986 we learned from Spycatcher, the memoirs of a senior MI5 official Peter Wright, that a secret file on Wilson, labelled the Henry Worthington file was kept in the MI5 ...”

“... Many Hollywood stars, for example, attend AA, but you won’t find yourself sitting next to Michael Douglas unless you happen to be in the industry and making seven-figure alimony payments. There is no copyright on the 12-step formula and any number of look-alike therapies have borrowed it: Al-Anon, Al-Ateen, Chocanon, MA (Marijuana Anonymous), Weight ...”

“... managed to reveal quite so many things that the [British] government wanted kept secret,’ writes Michael Goodman of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. And yet Pincher believes he never threatened the security of the state – that would be the work of a traitor, which is the way he described Snowden in a recent television ...”

“... circulation declined, notwithstanding its 1964 relaunch as the Sun, complete with the new Wilson-era slogan: ‘Born of the age we live in!’ When IPC finally decided to sell the Sun the circulation had fallen from 1.5m to 650,000 copies. After the print unions refused to discuss Robert Maxwell’s offer for the paper, Murdoch stepped in. ‘I am ...”