“... a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of those not infrequent war heroes who in peacetime are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in ...”

“... too good to resist. ‘This officer of artillery never misses an opportunity for attack,’ John Gawsworth, an admiring contemporary, observed. William Rothenstein thought him ‘armed and armoured, like a tank, ready to cross any country, however rough and hostile’. He certainly had a genius for pugnacity, no doubt partly encouraged by the example ...”

“... start of the operation to ask what they thought its legacy would be. Not one – not Labour’s John Reid, now Baron Reid of Cardowan, or Des Browne, now Baron Browne of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to ...”

“... he had concocted – potted shrimps rolled up in smoked salmon with small triangles of thinly cut brown bread – was motivated by hunger. Sometimes, when I was engaged in this illicit reading, my whole body shaking, I would try to envisage what my father would say were he to discover me in flagrante delicto. His first reaction would, I knew, be mockery, but ...”

“... books under review belong to very different genres, both of which are relevant to this task – John Willett’s a critical and historical study based on many years as reviewer, English editor and translator of Brecht, Ronald Hayman’s a lively, detailed biography – though the first turns out to be far the more expert, original and ...”

“... to write directly about paintings if they do not care about them too much. Nothing in the mass of John Koethe’s verse and philosophical prose, for instance, suggests that paintings haunted him continually in anything like the way they did Herbert. (If I do him an injustice, I apologise.) But this seems to have meant that when he spent an hour or two with ...”

“... Weight puts it in the first subheading of his introduction: ‘Amphetamines, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker’. Which is a nice phrase, even if it’s half-inched from an interviewee in a previous book, Jonathon Green’s flawless oral history of 1960s counterculture, Days in the Life. (In fact Green also used it as a subheading. This feels a bit ...”

“... digression, exposition, all done with stylish dispatch, admirably rendered by the translator, John Howe. Closer to a looped sequence of essays than a memoir, the book nonetheless shows off the memoirist’s skill to stunning effect in three somewhat unflattering portraits – Castro, Guevara and Mitterrand – and reminds us that distance and disloyalty ...”

“... Everyone was connected, one way or another. Three of Albertina’s brothers – Jimmy, Francis and John – joined the occupation, along with their uncle, Eddie. ‘It was like no other department in Cammell Laird’s,’ Albertina says. ‘Because it was all younger lads. And it was full of comedians. It was a joy to go into work. You’d rather go into work ...”

“... role. This is a life which is simply going through the motions, doggedly repeating its lines. John Nower’s fate appears determined in advance by the blood feud he inherits. His only destiny is to revenge his father’s murder and so perpetuate the feud. The strange fusion of Anglo-Saxon attitudes and up-to-date allusion (cars and gangsters and ...”

“... extend the anthology’s reach beyond what Ricks terms ‘our precious stones from Land’s End to John o’Groats, leave alone the emerald of Ireland’. On the other hand, the editorial policy excludes ‘the British Empire or the British Commonwealth’ through a historical Catch-22. Post-colonial poets are refused entry on the separate-but-equal principle ...”

“... One of Fischer’s sources notes the presence in the SA of these ‘beefsteaks’ who were brown on the outside and red within: ‘There is a joke about two SA men, one of whom complained that there were “so many Nazis” in his company. The other replies: “In our company there are still three, but we’ll soon chase them out.” ’ Problems ...”

“... not dictated by the needs and resources of a local economy. Some thirteen years ago I watched Sir John Habakkuk at a conference sketch out on the board how a drop in the average age of marriage in 1740 of two years, maintained throughout the rest of the century, would explain the whole expansion of 18th-century population in England: but everyone agreed that ...”

“... the morning to write his stuff – but never on Sunday, like Hemingway – and his donning an old brown robe to sit at his desk at dusk, like Balzac. Be that as it may, El Pais’s editorial page is thus made doubly noble by the new Nobel novelist. Recently a letter not to but from the Editor praised the writer’s exemplary habits of punctuality, order and ...”

“... that may be). In 1952 he went all the way to Goa to venerate the body of St Francis Xavier. ‘One brown stump of toe emerging from white wrapping,’ he noted approvingly. ‘Body fully vested, one grey forearm and hand, and grey clay-like skull visible.’ This seems only a step away from the pet cemetery in Forest Lawn, and Waugh’s gleeful interviews with ...”