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“... in the new life of Graham of Claverhouse, later Viscount Dundee, For King and Conscience by Magnus Linklater and Christian Hesketh. This book examines dispassionately the involvement of Claverhouse in the attempt to impose conformity on the South-West of Scotland, starting with his military defeat at Drumclog by those Kiernan labels as ...”

“... enough, I avoided power. Then Mark stopped being the editor and there was Godfrey Smith, and then Magnus Linklater, both of whom were very nice. I was then called senior editor. The other day I went to see James Fox, who had the French edition of White Mischief, which I come into. He’d put originally that Francis Wyndham, one of the senior ...”

“... In one sense, as the advertising claims, this is ‘the only book to tell the full story of the Jeremy Thorpe affair’, for there is no other book that tells that story. Written by three journalists from the Sunday Times, it presents the existing state of knowledge, but tidied up and reduced to order, and with some ‘investigative’ embellishments probably added ...”

“... It is fanciful to suppose that such facilities should be mothballed overnight. I have been reading Magnus Linklater and David Leigh’s book on the Westland affair.* One crucial passage, a quotation from an unnamed source, comes at the top of page 143: The Prime Minister knew about the leak. She was pleased it had been done. There was a meeting between ...”

“... 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. An inkling of the more enduring wounds for which Barbie was proud to share responsibility can be gathered from Claudine Vegh’s I didn’t say goodbye, a labour of love rather than literature in which the surviving children of French Jewish deportees talk to a psychiatrist who shared their experience: ‘I didn’t have a youth, I no longer have a mother, I have a sister who needs treatment, a father who hasn’t been able to lead a normal life since he came back ...”

“... no normal journalist’s checks, was rigorously opposed by the paper’s then news supremo, Magnus Linklater, as well as by the two members of the Observer’s investigative unit, David Leigh and Paul Lashmar. I added my voice to theirs, urging vigilance and caution. To no avail, however – and perhaps understandably. On Saturday, 11 January ...”

“... large part of their reputation, although not their survival to him. Two of them, Godfrey Smith and Magnus Linklater, now editor of the Scotsman, understood his talent and also knew the dangers. Francis avoided power, but he somehow had it anyway, Without, as Linklater put it, ‘lifting a finger’, he managed to ...”

“... It seems a shame that Eric Linklater was, as his biographer records, perpetually dissatisfied with how his work was received. His third novel (Juan in America, 1931) was the Book Society Choice (as was Private Angelo fifteen years later). He was at once in demand with Tauchnitz on the Continent. His articles were bought by the London dailies, the Listener, and Collier’s, his stories by Harper’s ...”