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“... Richard and Clare Winston are well-known as the authors of elegant and accurate translations of some of Thomas Mann’s essays and correspondence, including The Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955. While annotating that selection, Richard Winston began assembling material for what he intended to be an extensive biography of the writer ...”

“... of the search for an alternative to what he called ‘chewing barbed wire in Flanders’ was Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, who in December 1914 began proposing schemes which bypassed the Western Front. None found favour, so he came up with a different idea, proposing to knock Turkey out of the war using just an elderly section of ...”

“... In August 1940, Winston Churchill likened the relationship between Britain and America to the Mississippi: ‘It just keeps rolling along,’ he told the Commons, ‘full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant.’ In the car afterwards he sang ‘Ole Man River’ (out of tune) on the way back to Number Ten. Sixty years later, one might say the same about Ole Man Churchill, whose reputation just keeps rolling along ...”

“... seems to me a thoroughly good buy. Nine hundred-plus pages and thirty-plus quotations per page (Winston Churchill’s entries include ‘It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations’; also ‘Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash!’). The first issue of the ODQ was in 1941, the ...”

“... his career, or had rejected his strategic advice, were regarded as the enemy. Top of the list was Winston Churchill, who couldn’t help second-guessing his generals, and sought endlessly to persuade them to perform miracles with troops and equipment that they often did not possess. Second was Clement Attlee, who dismissed Wavell as viceroy in 1947 for ...”

“... not so much politicians as sublime social columnists who happened to sit in the House of Commons. Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle were heavyweights and professionals, and the eternal grind of committee life is reflected in their accounts. Yet both were writing with the special excitement of socialist voyeurs. Determined to expose the secrets of Whitehall ...”

“... been identified as the ‘Treasury View’. As Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1929, Winston Churchill gave it classic utterance. ‘It is the orthodox Treasury dogma, steadfastly held,’ he assured the House of Commons, ‘that whatever might be the political or social advantages, very little additional employment and no permanent additional ...”

“... and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by Stafford Cripps on his abortive mission to India. Working for the BBC gave Orwell the experience, however ...”

“... and local peoples between 1875 and 1907, ‘both sides had modern weaponry.’ So they did, but Winston Churchill was appalled by the one-sided slaughter at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, where the followers of the Mahdi had just two machine-guns, while Kitchener’s men had 55. The coercion and movement of labour is also underplayed. When indigenous ...”

“... studied English history from the Anglo-Saxons to the 20th century, from Alfred the Great to Winston Churchill, or to put it in somewhat less heroic terms, Ethelred the Unready to Neville Chamberlain (we didn’t bother in those days with the Welsh or the Scots). But in practice, if we were going to learn how to do any thinking of our own, we had time ...”

“... War One, government-subsidised French airlines began successfully offering cross-Channel services. Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for air, told the fledgling British airlines in 1919 that they would have to ‘fly by themselves’ but it quickly became apparent that government intervention was needed to get the airline industry off the ground. By ...”

“... fired by rabid anti-semitism or inspired by Völkisch crankiness that figure on the fringes of Richard Griffiths’s Fellow Travellers of the Right (1980), a book to which Kershaw pays just tribute. A peer of his standing did not consort with plebs and outsiders. He was the most respectable, and because of his coalmines in County Durham the richest, of the ...”

“... unashamed fan of minor Hollywood pictures. Breathless, as Godard readily admitted, was inspired by Richard Quine’s Pushover and could be seen as the direct sequel to Otto Preminger’s Bonjour tristesse. The central character of the film, the petty criminal played by Belmondo, modelled his self-image on that of Humphrey Bogart in Mark Robson’s The Harder ...”

“... Chinese emperor, he summoned them in the afternoon. Nixon, Henry Kissinger and an aide called Winston Lord quickly got into a limousine with Zhou and set off, leaving Bob Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, frantic with worry over their security. They entered Mao’s house, finding it ‘simple and unimposing’, as Kissinger noted, and with a ...”

“... people who have had information about themselves embargoed: Princess Ashraf, Alexander Haig and Richard (‘Dick’) Helms. Manifestly evasive though the diaries are, they are nonetheless exceptionally illuminating on two issues: on the last years of the Shah’s regime, seen from the inside; and on how to try to nobble Britain’s media intelligentsia and ...”