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“... Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar. He is a pillar of strength in a city of weak men. You will rely on him time and time again to maintain security. He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in’: thus Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, 1968. It is not often that a book casts fresh light on American history throughout this century, but this biography of Edgar Hoover does just that ...”

“... reaction to Britain’s intention to withdraw from its bases forced Harold Wilson to stay his hand; and Diego Garcia, where a whole island was cleared of its inhabitants to satisfy the needs of American intelligence. As for GCHQ itself, one of the effects of its alliance with the National Security Agency was to focus its attention more ...”

“... House of Commons cannot, alas, get to know civil servants well, unless the MPs are ministers. As Dick Crossman’s PPS, I had the privilege of having proper and fruitful conversations with the Dame (Evelyn Sharp), the late Sir James Waddell and others. Equally, as members of the Labour Delegation to the European Parliament, John Prescott and I were ...”

“... the writer’s identity is always a plaything: Quinn, the writer, uses the pseudonym William Wilson, who himself writes about the improbably named Max Work, and is mistaken for Paul Auster, ‘of the Auster Detective Agency’. (The ‘Auster’ character always gets the smartest lines in the story, being allowed, for example, to expand on his pet ...”

“... introduced herself to Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book jackets. I praised their work, I tried to make an impression, but my talk was seldom ...”

“... magic circle of lobby men, lunching with him at St Stephen’s Club once a week. He saw Harold Wilson every week too, with the other members of the ‘White Commonwealth’, as the handpicked political editors were then called. Yet he did not grow to love or respect these great men. On the contrary, in his book he portrays most of the prime ministers he ...”

“... Hundred and One Damnations demonstrated? In a racy account of the Alliance election campaign Des Wilson gives an excellent sense of what it must be like to be a hyperactive member of the crew of a plane which refuses to take off, waiting for the surge which never comes. The final section of his book, which is an election diary, has the merit of ...”

“... satisfaction. It probably gave him pleasure in later years to recall that on Christmas Day 1801 Dick sat next to Eliza, or that on Sunday 2 May 1802 J.F. (himself) was seated between Lord and Lady Thomond. For us, too, it can be a delight to savour such diagrams – especially when they include names like Fuseli, Flaxman and Turner. (On one occasion the ...”

“... forgettable. Indeed, it’s meant to be. Johnson’s greatest admiration often seems reserved for Dick Crossman, whom he takes to be a far greater intellect than he really was. Of his reports for the New Statesman Johnson comments that they ‘were always illuminating and exciting, though sometimes wrong-headed and quickly belied by events. This was not a ...”

“... riches of the very rich. Romney’s foreign policy advisers are graduates of the workshop of Dick Cheney and the various American outworks of the Likud or the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. These people – including Cofer Black, Michael Chertoff, Robert Kagan and Dan Senor – have their eyes on a goal beyond victory in Syria and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... changed the way the detective story worked – by removing most of the detecting. Take ‘House Dick’, now rescued from the yellowing pages and lurid covers of Black Mask to appear in Nightmare Town, a collection of stories spanning Hammett’s brief career. The narrator, known only as the Continental Op, is filling in for the Montgomery Hotel detective ...”

“... life. He eschews the cosmic. It seems that Mr Levin’s life was changed by discovering Moby Dick. Mr Johnson, as a young man, found it ‘unintelligible’. Now of course Mr Johnson in some sense took over from Mr Levin at what one is tempted to call the late London Times. He was a little worried, following on in this line: ‘Politics was my trade, not ...”

“... do so.No one in Washington has indulged in this form of shame more fiercely than Rumsfeld, except Dick Cheney. In Bush at War, Rumsfeld is presented as a grouchy, beguiling politician. ‘In some respects,’ Woodward writes, he ‘was a walking example of what novelist Wallace Stegner calls “resilience under disappointment”, the persistence of ...”

“... to resist it himself. Should he have been bolder? Should he, for example, have campaigned for Dick Taverne in the Lincoln by-election, deliberately courting expulsion from the Labour Party as Sir Stafford Cripps had courted it with his Popular Front campaign in the Thirties? Should he have challenged Wilson for the ...”