“... major trade-union leader of recent times was under regular surveillance by MI 5 ... Yet both Wilson and Heath forbade any interrogation.’ Pincher does not exaggerate the importance of the pre-war Cambridge connection, with one exception. That is John Cairncross, a non-smart Cambridge man of Scottish working-class background, who though detected in 1951 ...”

“... 16, or 16 and a half, and still at school when I read in the papers that a black American, Jimmy Wilson, had been sentenced to death for stealing a dollar. I can still recall that moment of deep shock. We couldn’t believe it. Even if he’d stolen a million, executing him was a bit much. So I got a few schoolfriends together, and said to them: ‘We ...”

“... did not offer coagulation by locality. Meanwhile Baker’s parodies roll rightmindedly by: Harold Wilson and the trade unions get theirs, and so of course do Kinnock and the nuclear fudgers. Fair enough, or rather not quite enough, since it is only Baker’s party pris which deems right-wing mendacious folly to be a protected species. Anyway these ...”

“... months since the late Seventies, when they killed Lord Mountbatten and 18 soldiers on one day. Tom King, the Northern Ireland Secretary, said that 500 new members of the RUC would be recruited, but he didn’t mention bringing in fresh troops. It is clear now that the SAS and possibly other undercover units were staking out police stations in anticipation ...”

“... of money, public adulation and staggering self-belief. ‘I really believe,’ he wrote to Edmund Wilson, whom he had met at Princeton, that ‘no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation.’ But he was already anticipating his later failure. ‘I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings ...”

“... when Ernest Bevin was Foreign Secretary and Zionist forces were attacking the British. However, Tom Segev points out that the British Army, as it withdrew from Palestine a year later, was careful to hand over its main military bases to the Zionist forces even as it attempted to protect Jaffa’s Arabs from eviction. For Israel’s new historians, among them ...”

“... Tom Nairn has, for many years, been pondering the peculiarities of the British state with impressive intelligence and originality. His earlier work, The Break-Up of Britain, remains a landmark – but had the curious deficiency of devoting relatively little space to England, which is, even from Nairn’s Marxist and Scots nationalist vantage-point, the heart of the matter ...”

“... Joan Collins if she could ‘borrow’ some of her jewellery (Collins refused). She asked a young Tom Cruise for a diamond tennis bracelet (made up of many identical settings), but Cruise didn’t know what she meant and sent some cash instead. Farrell, however, was in sympathy with what he called Taylor’s ‘appetites’ and bought her a diamond pendant ...”

“... Britain, of course, where Scoutcraft entails wiliness, such a boy might well grow up like Harold Wilson.) On Fussell’s cover is a picture of a keen-eyed lad with ‘Boy Scouts of America’ stitched on his khaki shirt: he is wearing the B.P. hat – to which American boys are fully entitled. Robert Baden-Powell, a skilled dress-designer, ordered those ...”

“... Marx – naturally – was the real Karl. Right now, columnist, game-show pundit and biographer of Tom Driberg, Francis Wheen is here to tell us that all the previous practitioners and theoreticians of Marx’s work – both the governments and the academics (in economics, history, geography, sociology, literature) who professed themselves Marxists – have ...”

“... the manoeuvre that crushed the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar, but in the age of Tom Paine and ‘Ça ira’, the navy’s cleverest tactical ploy may have been the great man’s handshake. Knight’s name for this is ‘benevolent paternalism’, but in a larger political context it might be called conservative populism. Nelson was not ...”

“... that unattractive deputy head of MI6, was, it appears, seduced at the age of 16 by Robbie Ross. Tom Driberg was ‘put under pressure’ by MI5 to inform on the Communist Party (he was an uninhibited homosexual cruiser) until, Andrew deduces, he was shopped by Anthony Blunt and expelled from the Party by Pollitt in 1941. If, however, we set on one side the ...”

“... If the CIA understood any of this, it never let on to its superiors in Washington, and Charlie Wilson, a highly paid Pakistani lobbyist and former congressman for East Texas, was anything but forthcoming with Congress about what was really going on. (During the 1980s, Wilson had used his power on the Appropriations ...”

“... Civilisation’s going to pieces,’ Tom Buchanan, the Yale-educated millionaire, abruptly informs Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged ...”

“... of two intellectuals who have put forward a case somewhat short of the Nationalist one: these are Tom Nairn and Neal Ascherson, both of whom are active in the organisation Common Cause – which, like Scotland United, is seeking to bring together with the Nationalists a largely leftist political movement. Their case is well-known: it depends on a series of ...”