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“... the Thatcher government like Douglas Hurd and William Waldegrave as well as her private secretary Charles Powell, and the late Yehudi Avner, who was Israel’s ambassador in London between 1983 and 1988. When she became prime minister a number of pressing questions faced Thatcher at home and abroad: the economy, the unions, Ulster, Rhodesia, the Cold War ...”

“... three Hollywood figures, a director (Barry Sullivan), an actress (Lana Turner) and a writer (Dick Powell), in that order. The first two refuse to take the call, the third takes it and tells Shields to drop dead. Next, still in the present, we see all three in the office of a movie producer (Walter Pidgeon), who is about to set up another call from Shields. He ...”

“... a showpiece, Whitechapel High Street’s strongest and most interesting frontage. The architect, Charles Harrison Townsend, designed similar heavily moulded round-arched entrances for the Bishopsgate Institute and the Horniman Museum. The spaces inside were much less emphatic – almost industrial in their plainness. Discreetly elegant improvements in 1988 ...”

“... about Simon Raven. She said she was more interested in whether Simon Raven was related to Canon Charles Raven. The character Jago in C.P. Snow’s novel sequence is said to be based on the late Canon, and I found that my ideas of Jago and the real Canon Raven were almost inextricably mixed: this made me recognise that I would find it impossible to ask James ...”

“... what I thought of Hitler’, and she was intensely proud of the British Empire. According to Sir Charles Powell, probably the most influential private secretary she had in Downing Street, the Prime Minister was in thrall to childhood memories. ‘For a small girl growing up in Grantham the Germans were about as evil as anything you could think of.’ In ...”

“... inside the beau monde of Brideshead, and its rhapsody on high Catholic society. Waugh, as the hero Charles Ryder, longs to be with the real in-group; and the artist in Waugh creates Ryder’s more obviously vulgar, because successful, doppelgänger, Rex Mottram, who has a Thatcherite vision of the attainability of all the distinguished things that Waugh/Ryder ...”

“... not to be stifled by them. Especially in its wide-ranging and sometimes over-informative notes (Charles Baudelaire? Oh, that Baudelaire) the book occasionally lapses into the tenure-seeking stodge of an academic thesis, as if its governing spirit emanated from the assembled professors in Ball of Fire. But mostly she keeps in mind how Barbara Stanwyck, in ...”

“... Syria. Washington has made it clear that it intends to deal with both regimes at once. When Colin Powell visited Bashar Assad after the conquest of Baghdad it was to name the price of Baathism’s survival in Syria: ending support for Hizbollah in Lebanon, closing the Damascus offices of Palestinian guerrilla organisations and deporting their leaders. He told ...”

“... But on a literal level, In the Lake of the Woods has eerier parallels to the career of Colin Powell, the recently retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the man currently being groomed for an Ike-like run at the US Presidency. Powell’s career, particularly that part of it least examined by the primarily ...”

“... before they had completed a breakthrough structure for Reliance Controls in Swindon, which Kenneth Powell describes as ‘neither a factory nor an office building nor a research station but a combination of all three’. The first of many ‘flexible sheds’ that Rogers has designed over the years, the Reliance Controls Electronics Factory owed much to the ...”

“... NHS since its inception in 1948. In a gratifyingly compressed, although at times grey, account, Charles Webster concludes that the Ely episode brought ‘a fresh spirit of determination’ to the care of long-stay patients. It did more than that: it released additional money, spurred improvements in hospital facilities and raised standards of ...”

“... Sacred Rhino of Uganda’? Thirdly, there will be a near-embargo on genealogical bullshit, Tony Powell stuff about the ancient Amises of Virginia, USA. We get a grandad with hairs sticking out of his red nose (‘how much I disliked and was repelled by him’), a grandma – ‘large, dreadful, hairy-faced’ – whom he remembers having ‘loathed and ...”

“... for security. There was public concern. ‘They’ began to be seen as a ‘problem’. Enoch Powell prophesied ‘rivers of blood’ and white working-class fascists shaved their heads. A series of Immigration Acts was passed, dividing families, stemming the flow. Most of the migrant workers had originally meant to stay a few years; go back with some ...”

“... the possibility. Probably the best account of his youthful self is in the first volume of Anthony Powell’s memoirs, Infants of the Spring. ‘He was one of those individuals – a recognised genus – who seem to have been sent into the world to be talked about. Such persons satisfy a basic human need. Connolly’s behaviour, love affairs, financial ...”

“... Uri Avnery’s two wartime memoirs, now collected as 1948: A Soldier’s Tale, were published in Hebrew in 1949 and 1950. In the first of them, In the Fields of the Philistines, the 25-year-old Avnery is an infantryman desperate for action; in the second, The Other Side of the Coin, he criticises his own ‘silly, rotten country’ for its conduct in the 1948 war ...”