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“... I am not an economic historian, which did not prevent me from being friends with Eric Hobsbawm for many years. It keeps me from opinionating here about his work as a historian, a more than economic historian, in fact, who wrote for a wide public. But it doesn’t stop me from writing about him in a personal way, with recourse to memories ...”

“... and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself – do these things go out with life?Faced with the ‘inevitable spoiler’, Lamb lived as many lives as he could. In the theatre: ‘the escape from life, the oblivion of consequences, the holiday … those Saturnalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the world’. In his ...”

“... would be responsible for intelligence abroad and Kell for counter-intelligence at home. Kell would go on to become the longest serving director of any government department (before Churchill sacked him early in the Second World War, blaming him for MI5’s chronic lack of preparedness), but to begin with his actions were dominated by a sense of the ...”

“... and then demoted to a knight by the Scrutiny Committee, in what is bitterly remembered as the Wilson Honours List. Was there a connection between Sir James’s elevation and his year-long battle to punish Private Eye and jail its editor, Richard Ingrams – an effort which was supported by Wilson and Lady ...”

“... From the 11th century to the 19th not a single Eric was to be found in England, according to the Harrap Book of Boys’ and Girls’ Names. Then in 1858 the schoolmaster Frederic Farrar, not yet a dean, published that passionately morbid tale Eric, or Little by Little. This was the book which, in the face of much mockery, put the wind up two generations of youth ...”

“... the man on the bridge was Andrew Johnson and not Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and not McKinley, Mrs Wilson and not Woodrow Wilson, Truman and not Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and not Kennedy, Ford and not Nixon, or even that there was nobody in the White House at all – as under Reagan. In short, a strong economy and great ...”

“... of an architect’s model, not designed for real life. In Brutalist Paris, Nigel Green and Robin Wilson praise the ‘important architectural interventions’ that resulted in ‘an often radical departure from the familiar, historical Paris, towards the establishment of multiple satellite centres’. But few of the buildings have weathered well. In ...”

“... in London, many of whom arrive by cab. But I can’t because I’m already busy. Q, with whom I go to a Japanese restaurant on not-far-off Chalton St, rings to say he is with his children near where I live; I tell him I’m at the library. There are faces I recognise from dust jacket photos, but overwhelmingly I know no one at the British Library, and ...”

“... and the Philippines ought not to be compared to the despotic actions of European powers. Woodrow Wilson insisted that only the US possessed the combination of military power and moral righteousness to make the world safe for democracy. Like Ferguson, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton begin with the premise that the US has always been an empire. But in contrast ...”

“... For some years now, the most impressive intellectual input to the Kinnock camp has been that of Eric Hobsbawm, who is actually a member of quite another party, a fact which is surely comment enough in itself. But Labour still exists, which the Alliance no longer does. In their different ways all the members of the old Gang of Four have effectively admitted ...”

“... mankind upon a cross of gold’.) His next two campaigns also ended in defeat. Woodrow Wilson, who strengthened antitrust legislation, instituted an income tax on wealthy Americans, subjected banks to regulation and expanded the rights of labour, carried the party forward in the direction Bryan had laid out. However, neither Bryan nor ...”

“... it represented were not the only enemies of the elected government. Like Joe Haines, Harold Wilson’s adviser in the first part of the 1974-1979 Labour Government, Bernard Donoughue finds plenty of important people lurking in the background to defend the existing order from any levelling which the Labour Government might threaten. He reveals that in ...”

“... as they were – and, as Morecambe would winningly say, ‘there’s no answer to that.’ Eric was once asked what Ernie and he might have become had they not been comedians. His reply: Mike and Bernie Winters. Eric and Ernie were a double act, and so were Mike and Bernie. But that’s where the similarities ...”

“... and/or cannot be enforced? This is the problem addressed by both these excellent books. Stephen Wilson’s canvas is narrower, but it enables him to ground his analysis in a wealth of illustrative detail. Nobody in Corsica had ever had a monopoly of violence; and the French authorities who tried to establish one in the century after the island became a ...”

“... the Dundas men were moderate in what they extracted and generous in the service they gave. A.N. Wilson’s book on Scott has an infectious enthusiasm. It reads, not like a systematic analysis of Scott’s writings, still less like a biography, but like good, if rambling talk. His achievement is to appreciate Scott’s remarkable historic sense. In the ...”