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“... just as the splendid F-16 fighter and A-10 attack plane had to be imposed by Defence Secretary James Schlesinger on an unwilling Air Force. The Army’s research bureaucracy has been particularly accident prone. Its attempt to build a successor tank to the undistinguished M-60 series went through two costly fiascos and al-most two decades before it finally ...”

“... Monarchy of Austria-Hungary) and now has, in English, an almost entirely new oeuvre to the one James Wood wrote about here soon after he died (and I wrote about in the TLS).* For a dead foreign writer to be allowed to carry on in this way is, to say the least, rather unusual. At that time, Wood wrote about a great comic writer, and I about a man whose best ...”

“... interesting pages where he recognises a group of novelists, from Hans Andersen to Henry James and Proust, as presenting special difficulties of inaccessibility. I think it unsurprising that, as well as making this potentially explosive discrimination among novelists, Tucker is also fairer to Blyton than most critics are. Inglis, equally identifying ...”

“... help from the electorate themselves. That is, it was enough until the arrival on the scene of James Goldsmith and Tony Blair. It is a sign of how little referendums have in common with fully democratic politics that a one-man, one-note band like Goldsmith’s anti-federalists were able to call themselves the Referendum Party and get away with ...”

“... despite its apparently relaxed approach to colonial ‘Marxism’. It was this approach that got Peter Wright het up enough to suspect his own director-general, Roger Hollis, of being a Soviet mole. (He thought the same of the relatively liberal Sir Andrew Cohen, governor of Uganda in the 1950s.) Wright got all this from the notorious CIA molehunter ...”

“... horrific realities of everyday life in a Nazi-conquered Britain (this found form as a novella, I, James Blunt). And in the summer of 1940 he wrote an article for Country Life entitled ‘The New “Merry England”’, in which he describes the invigorating camaraderie of Binsted, his home village, where he was the commander of the Local Defence ...”

“... after his death, is their originator. There are now six biographies, of which the best remains James Gleick’s inevitably-entitled Genius (1992). Feynman’s Caltech Lectures on Physics and collections of miscellaneous anecdotes and essays remain in print and in demand, as do audiotapes and videos of his lectures: he was a scientific performance artist of ...”

“... Incidentally, they know you know they know you know the code.’ Peter Ustinov’s Cold War satire Romanoff and Juliet (1956) could have been about Salisbury Court, the London home in the early 1580s of the French Ambassador to the Court of Elizabeth I, Michel de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissière, an establishment described by John Bossy as ‘zany, convivial and leak-ridden ...”

“... frivolity and public school backbone, was educated at Haileybury and Cambridge. As the critic John Peter has put it, ‘parts of the Criterion resembled a supplement to the Tablet – while, incomprehensibly, other parts were crowded with Marxists and moderns.’ Read was an anarchist who accepted a knighthood, a champion of avant-garde art who also edited the ...”

“... and those under him were closely scrutinised for any tremulousness of the upper lip. James Murray, an eminent Scottish biologist who accompanied Fawcett’s 1911 expedition along the upper Heath River, was tested particularly harshly, being an interloper from the more showily dramatic – and better-funded – world of polar ...”

“... about Bathsua Makin, a noted 17th-century polyglot, says she was presented at the court of James I because of her ability to ‘speak and write pure Latin, Greek and Hebrew’. ‘But can she spin?’ the king asked. John Gallagher relates this story and many like it in Learning Languages in Early Modern England, in which he assembles a rich body of ...”

“... by the splendid pictures: as a catalogue, however, it is a most valuable possession. For Peter Padfield in his Armada the context spreads wide to include not only the historical background but the designing, building, rigging and sailing of the ships on either side; and on this subject he is well-informed and interesting, since he spent much of his ...”

“... mettle in the towns, where they could prepare for government once the Red Army had come through. Peter Conradi handles this material extremely well, and draws on E.P. Thompson’s lectures in Stanford in 1981 about his brother, later collated by his widow, Dorothy Thompson, as Beyond the Frontier. E.P. is more committed than Conradi to the idea that Frank ...”

“... it plain he ‘would not return alive’. Using the alias ‘Omar Hakim’, he also accompanied Peter Arnett and Peter Bergen of CNN to the caves. Bergen was sufficiently struck by his intensity and intelligence to talk about him in his book on al-Qaida, Holy War Inc; only later did he become aware of al-Suri’s ...”

“... is a list in the Sun of ‘100 Britons we love to hate’, which places him in the company of James Hewitt, Jonathan Aitken and Simon Cowell. On a number of occasions, she connects Joyce’s case with that of Roger Casement, another Irishman hanged for treason in Britain during a world war. The comparison is, to put it mildly, flattering to Joyce, who had ...”