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“... Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather of Tony Blair’s revolution, the original Labour moderniser,’ the blurb begins. With Labour under Blair ...”

“... granny, coming from a stratum where the existence of ancestors cannot be assumed, and consequently took offence where none – perhaps – was offered. But there was no one present with shorthand, a camera or an eidetic memory: contemporary accounts are thin and inconsistent. Henry Sidgwick’s sister wrote her memories of the battle in friends’ albums – I ...”

“... placed in the Fellows’ Garden at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he is commemorated beside John Milton. There is occasion to take a look at them, nonetheless, for we now have this account of the man by his brother, Philip Snow. ‘Brothers seldom write about each other,’ as the publisher says, and one may think that in general they are wise not to do ...”

“... near-homophonous Alistair MacNeill; two of his screenplays had already been turned into novels by John Denis; and a third screenplay is undergoing similar treatment by Simon Gandolfi. In this curious world there are occasional legal hiccups. One such, not so much a hiccup as a cardiac arrest, recently befell HarperCollins when they were prosecuted and heavily ...”

“... seems to have been making representations to his former colleagues. In April 2020, as the pandemic took hold, Cameron pressed the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, to include the now ailing Greensill in the government’s Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF). The scheme had been designed to give temporary taxpayer-funded loans to Britain’s biggest companies ...”

“... conformity’ – a dodge enabling non-conformists to hold public office if they periodically took communion in the Anglican Church – was opening the door, the Memorial argued, to Puritan fanaticism and the levelling politics that came with it. Daniel Defoe, an able provocateur in his own right, thought the Memorial ‘Mutinous Bluster’, ‘a ...”

“... Centre, and it was just as promised: he felt no more than ‘a slight pinch’ as a phlebotomist took two drops. But as for how it all worked, Holmes would only say that ‘a chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed ...”

“... and Zionist activist (she was Golda Meir’s best friend and a primary mentor to the young men who took over the New Republic in the 1970s). Reznikoff refused to accompany her on her many trips to postwar Europe, Palestine, and later Israel – explaining that he hadn’t finished exploring Central Park – but happily went to the meetings and fundraising ...”

“... and – with the help of some ‘Jean faux-papiers’ forger – answered to no fixed identity. It took time for that glamour to wear thin, a process started in my case by getting to know the real France and French families in the postwar years. To my dismay, I discovered how many people who had hated ‘les Boches’ and could not be called collaborators ...”

“... By chance, the evening I took this book to bed for the painful reading expected, I jabbed the tooth of a comb down a fingernail and cried out. As a reminder of what Klaus Barbie was about, not just at the Hotel Terminus in Lyon forty years ago but at the Bolivian Joint Chiefs of Staff headquarters in La Paz as late as 1980, the moment served ...”

“... turn in the tide of battle prevented a worse catastrophe than Hiroshima. In March 1985, Vanunu took his camera into the Dimona plant and systematically photographed it. How he was able to do so remains an important question for Israeli state security, celebrated so often (with the help of its own propaganda machine) as ruthlessly efficient. At any rate, by ...”

“... who range from newspaper editors to political historians, it may make very little difference. As John Kenneth Galbraith has observed, changing the top man in important business corporations rarely affects the price of their shares on the market. A rapid glance at the history of the USA also suggests scepticism about the impact of individual leaders. That ...”

“... one will not find much in either Michael Leapman’s sympathetic and readable portrait, or John Cole’s lively and good-humoured canter over the events of the last decade, to change one’s mind. The nature of the Labour Party’s – and Kinnock’s – problem was vividly illustrated by what happened when James Callaghan resigned the leadership late ...”

“... to other people, he made no provision for his wife and children. Every commercial venture he took up was a failure. Like the Joyces, the Mangans flitted from one miserable house to another. The misfortunes the poet suffered included illness of several kinds, debility, and in later years addiction to drink and, it may be, to opium. His employment was ...”

“... other side of the Atlantic (in France and America they occupied great universities: here, students took over colleges of art). The FBI put Ayers and Dohrn at the top of its ‘most wanted’ lists; in Germany, the violent actions, trials and suicides of the RAF leaders dominated and defined the political culture of the mid-1970s. It’s hard to conceive of ...”