“... isn’t convinced by the case for voting for a lesser evil. ‘The suffering’, Noam Chomsky and John Halle wrote in June, that Trump’s ‘extremist policies and attitudes will impose on marginalised and already oppressed populations has a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will result from a Clinton presidency’. My father ...”

“... given to jokes, even if his poems are often wry:As I sd to myfriend, because I amalways talking, John, Isd, which was not hisname, the darkness sur-rounds us, whatcan we do againstit or else, shall wewhy not, buy a goddamn big car,drive, he sd, forchrist’s sake, lookout where yr going.‘I Know a Man’ was included in Creeley’s first major ...”

“... the Ridley camp to claim that their man was misquoted or that any breach of professional ethics took place. Not only is this the sort of thing he says: he must have supposed that it was opportune, or at least safe, to say it while the tape-recorder rolled. This is what immediately made Dominic Lawson’s ears prick up. ‘The point is,’ he rightly ...”

“... it was Chamberlain, breaking with old orthodoxies, who sought to achieve through tariff reform Sir John Seeley’s vision of a Greater Britain equipped for the struggles of the 20th century. Many efforts have been made to interpret Chamberlain and the great U-turn he performed in mid-career. Inevitably, the supporters of Mr Gladstone regarded him as a traitor ...”

“... venereal diseases, became the Führer’s personal doctor at Christmas 1936. The elevation, which took place during a visit to Hitler’s retreat on the Obersalzberg, was greeted by Morell’s wife with the oracular words: ‘What do we need with that!’ – a rendering, presumably, of ‘Wozu brauchen wir das?’ The diaries begin in July 1941, a few weeks ...”

“... 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. His autobiographical Growing up in London was followed by Growing up on the ‘Times’ which concentrated on his overseas assignments. Both were vivid and zestful memoirs. Memories of Times Past is an odd ...”

“... he cannot continue his roll call of Gregory’s friends because ‘a thought/Of that late death took all my heart for speech.’ We may grant Yeats command of that trick and also say that to confront horror with irony calls for the powers of a Swift. Neither of these devices was available to Amis, unless one were to argue that there is, within his ...”

“... Leone’s long, long close-up of Eastwood’s or Fonda’s impassive face; the Warhol movie of John Giorno sleeping for five hours and 20 minutes; Jarman’s 79-minute single shot of saturated blue.Or I could do nothing. I could sit in sadistic silence waiting for whatever is next on his list of diagnostic appointment moves for all ...”

“... the Queen’s Gallery. Nasir-al-Din Haider had got clearance from the resident in Lucknow, Colonel John Low, and from the governor-general in Calcutta, Lord William Bentinck, to dispatch the offerings: two elephants, two superb horses with jewelled harnesses, sundry necklaces, bracelets and Indian manuscripts galore, together with a bedstead studded with ...”

“... to reorganise the dioceses, so as to fortify the Church against the Lutheran threat, which Wolsey took very seriously (and which the reader may suspect to have owed some of its following to anti-clericalism). If Wolsey’s plans for reforms were limited, it was because fundamental change was unnecessary. If they were not fully implemented, it was because he ...”

“... contacts. This utterly shocked opinion in every officers’ mess in Ulster – and in MI5, who took over intelligence operations there from MI6 in 1973. Exactly like the French Army before it in Algeria, these key circles within the British Army now decided that in order to prevent a sell-out of the imperial position in the overseas province by leftists ...”

“... devotees to complain that Americans have got him all wrong. As early as 1897, the radical John Jay Chapman presented him as a fellow iconoclast who had been miscast as an apologist for American selfishness, ‘embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved’. The tendency of biographers to make their own Emersons means that some academics dislike the ...”

“... such an event.A less well-known but more interesting scam than any of these was pulled off by Dr John Ackah Blay-Miezah, who persuaded investors across Ghana and the US that he was the sole beneficiary of a $27 billion trust fund hidden away in Swiss bank accounts by Kwame Nkrumah. He explained that as the former Ghanaian president’s closest confidant, he ...”

“... exhibition Mellor got in touch with her daughter, Boty Goodwin, who was then in her twenties. She took him to the family home in Kent and he saw a cache of her mother’s paintings, which transformed his ideas: ‘Suddenly the whole history of British Pop Art was different.’Well, yes and no. As Marc Kristal suggests in the introduction to his widely ...”

“... events occurred not dissimilar to those described.’ However it came about, Lees-Milne certainly took the secretarial course. After that, to his father’s annoyance, he was wangled by his mother into Magdalen College, Oxford. His Eton housemaster, who was married to a friend of Mrs Lees-Milne, had been persuaded to write assuring the college that her son ...”