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“... yield from the first atomic explosion was low – only one entry for the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. When the plutonium bomb exploded on the Jornada del Muerto near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, Robert Oppenheimer, the Scientific Director ...”

“... Some writers have an unfair start in life. ‘When I was born, in July 1923, my mother was carried on a litter or “dandy” to the hospital by two murderers. My first ayah was a Burmese murderess called Mimi. Our servants were murderers.’ I do not recall Raleigh Trevelyan slipping this information into the lunchtime conversation when he was my publisher (a very helpful and tolerant one – interest duly declared ...”

“... In a dingy waiting-room in Sinn Fein’s Falls Road headquarters in Belfast there is a mural of the Maze Prison – Long Kesh, as Republicans call it. Above it are painted the faces of IRA martyrs, and these verses: I think how they Suffer in Prison Alone Their Friends Unavenged and their Country Unfreed: Oh Bitter I said is the Patriot’s Mead ...”

“... Britain’s constitutional revolution is proceeding at such a pace that it is easy to lose sight of the meaning of it all. The reforms of the past generation – the delegation of quasi-sovereignty to Brussels, devolutions to assemblies in Northern Ireland and Wales and a parliament in Scotland, the passage of the Human Rights Act and the creation of the Supreme Court, the continuing transformation of the House of Lords – have already begun to shake the foundations ...”

“... Hugh Munro was shot in the head as he crossed no-man’s-land. The night had been dark. Some of the soldiers accompanying him had lit up when they stopped to rest, and the glowing cigarettes attracted a German sniper’s attention. His last words were reported to be: ‘Put that bloody cigarette out!’ The soldier was perhaps the wittiest writer Britain ...”

“... often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities. The enemy has stayed the same – roughly, overweening literary Modernism. Has Carey’s curious Oxonian populism truly changed, or just, as it were, moved colleges? The Intellectuals and the Masses was the ...”

“... In November 1913, ‘the Headingly two’, a dark-haired woman of about twenty-five and ‘a girlish figure in green cap and sports jacket’, stood trial for attempting to set fire to a football stand in Leeds. Among the evidence produced against them were some postcards, one declaring ‘No Vote, No Sport, No Peace – Fire, Destruction, Devastation’ and another addressed to Asquith: ‘We are burning for “Votes for Women” ...”

“... that the British reviewer feels he needs to be very tactful. A prevailing theme is the matter of American idealism, innocence and patriotism. Often he recommends Americans to emulate the wiliness, the ‘irony’ and ‘sophistication’ of wicked old Europe. Sometimes, though, without his confusing ‘irony’, he ...”

“... generally agreed except possibly in the Fens that Evelyn Waugh was the greatest English novelist of his generation. Certainly Graham Greene, Henry Green and Angus Wilson thought so, although they and not he won the worldly honours Waugh would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that ...”

“... and is now slightly less so. Anthony Cavendish has always been very right-wing. Both authors write of their profound respect for one of their former bosses, George K. Young. Young, who died recently, was deputy head of MI6 until he joined the merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson in 1961. One ...”

“... Louis Heren, the veteran foreign correspondent, had hoped to become editor of the Times in succession to William ReesMogg, when Rupert Murdoch bought the newspaper. Heren was told that, at 61, he was too old. Under Harold Evans he failed to flourish (‘Evans trashes me, to use the US Army expression, and most of my former colleagues in his book Good Times, Bad Times’), so he took his redundancy money and settled for writing books ...”

“... about lunch. A good lunch with one’s publisher is sometimes the only thing that keeps one going on a project threatening to go stale. The worst thing that usually looms over the soup is a missed deadline. The diaries of Parviz Radji, the Shah’s last ambassador to London, are largely about lunches and dinners, many ...”

“... Writing for the centenary celebrations of the Trafalgar victory one hundred years ago, Joseph Conrad produced a remarkable, and peculiar, essay arguing that Nelson was a great, and a modern, artist. His genius was to revolutionise ‘not the strategy or tactics of sea-warfare, but the very conception of victory itself ...”

“... This book is primarily the product of some fiercely hard reading, a reaction to the shock of finding something out from books. It has some directly autobiographical elements – a letter to the author’s father, reminiscences of a dead sister, chats with Christopher Hitchens, tales of Oxford and the old New Statesman office, and so on ...”

“... Seven miles high above the Bay of Biscay and bound for Madrid, reading the daily papers is the alternative to a British Airways breakfast at noon. What is news? A kiss, it seems. England has won a Test Match and Emburey is conveying his congratulations to Ian Botham. It is front-page news for the Guardian but back-page for the Daily Express ...”