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“... This is a tale of sickness, corruption and degradation at the highest levels of American economic, social and political life. It makes me ashamed of my country, and terrified for its future. The analogy that fits is Rome under Nero. The retribution that is surely coming will be terrible to behold. The tale is told in the form of a biography of one of the minor players ...”

“... of Eisenhower and Berlin and even Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment. Dr Ambrose’s theme, expressed most explicitly in the foreword to his first volume, is adulatory: that as a soldier Eisenhower was ‘everything that the US Army hoped for in its finest product’, that as President he ‘ran the show’ and that as a human being ...”

“... and obscenities will have to wait for Caro to finish – if they live long enough. Well before Stephen Ambrose got blindsided a few months ago by the plagiarism police, he produced solid biographies of Eisenhower in two volumes (1983-84) and Nixon in three (1987-91). And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not ...”

“... argument is therefore aimed at rehabilitating not only Eisenhower’s methods, but his goals. Stephen Ambrose, whose two-volume biography is the most comprehensive study of Eisenhower yet to appear, provides the clearest version of this case. ‘Dwight Eisenhower,’ he writes, ‘was a great and good man. He was one of the outstanding leaders of the ...”

“... of the World’s Longest Biography rather than of the World’s Greatest Statesman. From Stephen Ambrose, the indispensable Eisenhowerist who naturally writes of the WSC-Eisenhower relationship, to Philip Ziegler, the tactful Mountbatten biographer who does for WSC and the monarchy, the contributors cover almost every imaginable WSC facet and ...”

“... films provide. (‘More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than from any other source,’ Stephen Ambrose is supposed to have said, and for better or worse, I believe him.) But you notice, after a while, that the errors all face in a certain direction, and serve to make the same points, while all the things that are supposed to stay under the ...”

“... organisation. De Loach took this as a direct threat from Johnson. In his preface to the Diaries, Stephen Ambrose rightly says that this Nixonite approach to LBJ in 1973 was ‘prospective blackmail’. He also notes that the italic deletion cited above is ‘the only place in the book where an example is given of a deletion by the National Security ...”

“... If the snappish Ambrose Bierce had been asked to define the word ‘exhibition’, he would probably have said it was an expensive faraway folly to which parents with fractious children journeyed to see a lump of coal, a steam engine and three hundred kinds of wood. As a schoolboy in 1925 I was taken, willingly enough, to Wembley to the British Empire Exhibition, then in its second triumphal year ...”

“... for granted elsewhere. They order these things somewhat better in the Council of Europe, where Stephen Mennell, a disciple of Norbert Elias, began work on All Manners of Food. The slow-baked book that has finally emerged reads like a series of essays on pertinent food topics in cultural history rather than a comprehensive account of what has been ...”

“... Stephen Leacock, the English-born, Canadian-reared humorist, has a single entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘Lord Ronald ... flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions’ (1911). Innumerable speakers, writers and politicians have helped themselves to this very serviceable joke; Leacock himself, writing in old age, used it without acknowledgment to illustrate a scientific disquisition ...”

“... of his ability to steer the bargain through Congress. The legislative triumph went instead to Stephen Douglas, a politician from Illinois who, though four years younger than Lincoln, had already gained the national prominence he craved. In 1854, as the government debated the admission of Nebraska, Douglas persuaded Congress to abandon the Missouri line in ...”

“... Egerton at the National Gallery tells me that Breakspears was once the childhood home of Elizabeth Stephen, the bride of William Hallett, who together constitute Gainsborough’s Morning Walk, and that Reynolds’s Captain Tarleton used to hang in the house. Captain Tarleton is one of the paintings (another being Millais’s Lorenzo and Isabella) which would ...”