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“... the British and their Free French allies. Churchill’s man with de Gaulle was Major General Edward Louis Spears, half-English, half-Irish by birth, French by upbringing and education, a career British cavalryman whose two languages (he had also qualified as an Army Interpreter in German), courage (four times wounded) and temperament had made him a name ...”

“... He speaks of the Cambridge which educated him as still unchangingly complacent, and he might have said, too, that Cambridge is unchangingly combative, a state of mind only superficially at odds with complacency. Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam saw such prickliness in a Cambridge friend of theirs: It is Tennant’s misfortune that with a soul yearning for ...”

“... Western money, if released, would go to propping up the same grandiose industrial projects that Edward Gierek wastefully embarked upon a decade ago. Expensive new technology from the West has been used (and would be used again) as a substitute for reform, not as a vehicle for it. For those Poles happiest to ‘make martial law work’, the old Party ...”

“... How bogus was Baldwin? When he said in 1925, ‘I give expression, in some unaccountable way, to what the English people think’, the statement was, as Philip Williamson notes in this ambitious new assessment, ‘in any literal sense … untrue’. Similarly with his claim to be ‘voicing what is in the minds of the dumb millions of this country’, though there the assertion was so framed as to make falsification more difficult ...”

“... his cancer diagnosis in March this year. He died on 9 June. ‘On the morning of 4 March,’ he said in a final interview in the Guardian, I thought everything was hunky-dory except I had a sore back and my skin looked a bit funny. By the evening of the fourth I’d been told I had only a few months to live. By that time I’d written 90 per cent of the ...”

“... which enormously commended him to Churchill, whose speechwriter he became in 1946. By 1949 he was said to be one of only three people to whom Churchill ever listened, but Churchill was in his dotage when he returned to power in 1951 – hence the importance of Butler, the great patron. From the first, Maudling showed the typical qualities of the ...”

“... miscarriage on him. Many years later, Fortune told me that Mead had eventually rounded on him and said he was such an aggressive man that he should go off to study warfare in another tribe. He obliged, and then one day a runner came with a letter from Mead announcing that she was going off with Bateson. ‘What would you have done?’ he asked me. I shook my ...”

“... camera? Isherwood for his part was never sure. ‘I have no idea what I’m like totally,’ he said in 1973, by which point he had known himself for 69 years. ‘I mean, I have no sense of myself as a person exactly, just as a lot of reactions to things.’ Mirrors feature strongly in Isherwood. Aged 34, Isherwood anatomised Isherwood with a typically cold ...”

“... patched and pieced and retold and revoiced the material. During the Soviet era, as Ugrešić has said, the use of traditional material gave writers freedom because it appeared to conform to the populist and nationalist policies of the state. (Lenin had claimed that folktales could be used as the basis for ‘beautiful studies about the hopes and longings of ...”

“... in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he complained that Britain was investing in a vision of ...”

“... have been canvassed since Eden’s death. The choice for the ‘authorised’ biography is said, though I have never seen any public announcement, to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly ...”

“... in charge. ‘We are not going to hurt anybody,’ Father Michael Dougherty of Lansing, Michigan said. ‘We just want access to this place’ – he pointed north – ‘to Jerusalem.’ From the checkpoint, Jerusalem was a ten-minute drive. A young American marcher urged the soldiers: ‘Come, join us in Jerusalem.’ The older soldier ordered the ...”

“... I really ought to have been writing. Some examples: ‘She had a face like an upturned canoe,’ said by the actor Charles Gray at breakfast in Dundee (though of whom I can’t remember). A. I’ve been salmon fishing. B. It’s not the season. A. No. I thought I’d take the blighters by surprise. ‘Here we are. Fat Pig One and Fat Pig ...”

“... a kind of animal innocence, not knowing their own cruelty. An Awfully Big Adventure could be said to relate to both genres. It is remarkable, however, in suggesting some of these mechanisms without making disturbed adolescent girls seem a different species. The production which the events of the story bring to an end is of Peter Pan. In it Stella ...”

“... the adjacent ocean. Those born in a country of such intense heat are mostly black in colour. It is said that they are no different in human nature, being kindly and compassionate.’ This would be an unusually enlightened opinion even today in one of the most racially conscious countries in the world. The public curiosity for foreign exotica, new gadgets and ...”