“... the writer working and sleeping in the house alone. We spoke on the phone sometimes about Dwight MacDonald and essayists he knew and loved. And one time we had a conversation by satellite at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Norman had a way of delighting audiences and he worked them, playing the old roué, then next minute the fierce political ...”

“... mission to bring democracy to the world’s benighted. In The Fight Is for Democracy (2003), George Packer argued that a ‘vibrant, hardheaded liberalism’ could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of The Good Fight (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only Liberals ...”

“... Pass On the Torch of Life)’.Buchan was close to Stanley Baldwin and later to Ramsay MacDonald, but neither saw him as cabinet material. His parliamentary colleagues found his speeches Rees- Moggianly eccentric: ‘How could you take a man entirely seriously if he talked in Ciceronian periods, yet your children were snatching his latest thriller ...”

“... south from Derby to confront the hastily mustered Hanoverian army under the direct command of George II. As in previous engagements, the numerical superiority of the Government forces was more than matched by the mobility of the Scottish irregulars and the imaginativeness of their leaders. When the Jacobites swung east from Barnet to approach London ...”

“... period, the 1967 edition Podhoretz is ‘in with the in-crowd’ (Jackie Kennedy, Lillian Hellman, George Plimpton); he goes where the in-crowd goes, knows what the in-crowd knows. Podhoretz was even invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball of 1966, the party of the century. There could have been no greater confirmation of his having ‘arrived’. In ...”

“... back on the pre-reform era, saw little reason to dispute its unsavoury reputation. Even Michael MacDonald, whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in ...”

“... The Merchant of Venice in 1970, he says, Olivier turned up with a hook nose and goatee modelled on George Arliss’s Disraeli and had to be persuaded by his director, Jonathan Miller, to evolve in the succeeding weeks a characterisation based on his own face. No one seems to have told Holden that dress rehearsals normally complete, not commence, the rehearsal ...”

“... lectured in Europe. He married four times. He never settled down at a magazine for long, as Dwight Macdonald or Edmund Wilson eventually settled down at the New Yorker, or Howe settled down at his own magazine, Dissent, or Irving Kristol or Norman Podhoretz at theirs. He was never at home anywhere for very long. He was simply never at home. Cook’s biography ...”

“... were of the Left – Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy (her generous literary executor) and Dwight MacDonald – and she supported, usually with some individual overtone, the advanced causes of the era, from Castro to Vietnam. In the early Sixties she achieved a succès de scandale with her articles (for the New Yorker) on the Eichmann Trial in ...”

“... Johnston dropped out of the cabin, and lay dead on the ground. The van skidded to a halt, and George Stirton – a plain-clothes officer – jumped off, letting fire at the assailants from his own revolver. Within seconds, he was hit on the wrist of his right hand, and dropped the gun. Three shots banged into the van’s radiator, as ...”

“... got out. Because Disraeli was a bona fide imperialist – a believer, like many of those around George Bush, in the principle of Imperium et Libertas – he could demonstrate that he had no goal other than that of freeing the hostages and punishing their captors only by sacking the place where they had been held. The ‘higher principles of humanity’ he ...”

“... strongly critical of some of his appointments, especially of ‘internationalists’ such as George H.W. Bush, James Baker and Caspar Weinberger. Weinberger was one of the few figures in the administration to show concern about white extremism. Reagan only made matters worse by allying himself with Jewish neoconservatives, who his far-right critics ...”

“... but that doesn’t mean it is free from political calculation. As one disgruntled Labour MSP, George Foulkes, complained during the vigorous early days of the SNP’s first government, they are ‘doing it deliberately’. These are state-building manoeuvres, designed to establish the credibility and groundwork for a transition to independence, carried ...”

“... among those who knew him, the puzzle remained: a born writer, but of what? Walker Evans, Dwight Macdonald and Robert Fitzgerald in their memoirs of Agee all describe an enchanting talker and an inspired observer of people. Also of cities, houses, symphonies, books, movies; one who lived hard, drank hard, and knew the force of his own feelings ...”

“... correspondents – right up to the miners’ strike of 1984-85.’ In a fascinating essay about George Woodcock, the TUC General Secretary in the 1960s, Taylor expresses similar feelings about the unions’ inability to establish a relationship with government which would give them a lasting right to joint decision-making. Woodcock, he says, tried in his ...”