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“... even ruthlessly so’, ‘obstreperous’, ‘loud’, ‘aggressive’, ‘exuding hubris’, ‘raw bumptiousness’, and so on. At Oxford, absurdly, he stood for the presidency of the Union in his very first term. The English upper classes have, enthusiastically and for generations, paid large sums of money in order to exile their male children from home ...”

“... Harold Macmillan’s judgment on Anthony Eden, that ‘he was trained to win the Derby in 1938; unfortunately, he was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955,’ was echoed by Anthony Nutting: ‘he had for too long been the Golden Boy of the Tory Party, the glamorous Crown Prince awaiting the summons to mount the throne in place of the ageing Emperor ...”

“... Peter Hennessy’s new book hasn’t persuaded me that its central preoccupation, the current dispute over prime ministerial power and its extent, is not sterile and, indeed, rather boring – yet it is a splendid read. The truth is that the Westminster system is quite inadequately democratic and transparent, and Hennessy is, if anything, too respectful and conventional in his proposals about how the office might be reformed ...”

“... On 5 October 1990, Britain entered the ERM: on 16 September 1992, ‘Black Wednesday’, Britain left the ERM. These two events and the years between them were crucial in recent British politics. They are the source of the divisions in the contemporary Tory Party and all the leading participants are obliged to state and restate what they said and did then in much the same way that the members of an earlier Tory generation had to spell out the position they’d taken over Munich ...”

“... people were under arrest in Zambia but of these only 400 were seasoned fighters: the rest were raw recruits plus women and children. The Zambian Army didn’t let any supplies get through to the camp and 105 hungry fighters defected to Zipra, but Kaunda was wary of taking his starvation tactics too far and eventually the Zambian Army was sent in to bully ...”

“... One of the unheralded heroes of the end of the Cold War was General Y.P. Maksimov, the commander in chief of the Soviet strategic rocket forces during the hardliners’ coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. He made a pact with the heads of the navy and air force to disobey any order by the coup plotters to launch nuclear weapons. There was extreme concern in the West that the coup leader, Gennady Yanayev, had stolen Gorbachev’s Cheget (the case containing the nuclear button) and the launch codes, and that the coup leaders might initiate a nuclear exchange ...”

“... The Second World War is the conflict that shaped all our lives and will go on shaping lives for generations to come. Looking at it in terms of the key decisions that determined its course and outcome – all of them taken in a period of about eighteen months – could have had the effect of disposing of the war as the sort of heroic recitation that too much TV history has turned it into ...”

“... corresponded with what they wanted to hear or, more often, they would simply supply mountains of raw data which their political masters could interpret in any way they liked. Even with proper evaluation procedures, as Cradock shows, there is still the problem of trying to understand how people in different cultures think. Not many guessed that Sadat would ...”

“... You are one of the most difficult men to work with that I have ever known,’ Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, once told FDR. ‘Because I get too hard at times?’ Roosevelt asked. ‘No,’ Ickes replied, ‘because you won’t talk frankly, even with people who are loyal to you.’ Joseph Persico, whose admiration for FDR, like that of many Americans, is close to hero-worship, treats FDR’s endless deceptions and tricks with indulgence ...”

“... When I was in Harare recently I inquired about an old naturalist I’d known there. He knew he had cancer, had told his friends he’d finished his book, was all through and would like to be cremated. Since nothing works in Zimbabwe any more he’d got in a nice store of mopani logs and was sure his friends would know what to do. They did. When he died they came round, wrapped his body in a blanket, made a funeral pyre and stood around it, glass in hand, till it burned low ...”

“... When Susan Pedersen writes that Eleanor Rathbone was the most significant woman in British politics in the first half of the 20th century she might have added that another Somerville alumna, Margaret Thatcher, clearly earned that title in the century’s second half. No one can doubt the extent to which Thatcher stamped herself on the 1980s, but the effect of reading this fine biography is to make one wonder, not just why Rathbone is now forgotten but whether she wasn’t Thatcher’s superior in everything but achieving power ...”

“... There is a terrible relentlessness about Thatcher’s Fortunes, a chronicle that can be easily summed up. Mark Thatcher, talentless, and so graceless that the most charming thing about him was that he would sometimes introduce himself as ‘charmless Mark’, was – is – doted on by ‘Mummy’, in whose eyes he could do no wrong and who insisted, against all the evidence, that he was a ‘born businessman ...”

“... The political climate in South Africa when the Rivonia trial began in November 1963 was so poisonous that Joel Joffe, then a young lawyer, took the case on only because he had already decided to emigrate. Two years later, he wrote up his lively insider’s view of the trial and allowed Lionel Bernstein, the only defendant to get off, to rewrite it to the point of virtual co-authorship ...”

“... A year ago you could probably have got odds of 100-1 against the proposition that the man chosen to open the ANC’s first national conference back in South Africa would be Jacob Zuma, the frequently feared chief of intelligence of the ANC’s guerrilla arm, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). But supreme among Mr Zuma’s qualities is the fact that he is one of the rare Zulus in the ANC’s leadership, a status which quickly earned him promotion to head of the ANC’s Southern Natal region, which includes Durban ...”

“... Will Hutton, the Guardian’s economics editor, has produced a book which is part show-biz – it carries a passionate puff from Ian McEwan on the front cover and leapt straight into the bestseller list – and part political event: it clearly aims to provide a sweeping economic and political platform for Labour, has been elaborated with the help of Tony Blair’s adviser, David Miliband, and sees Blair’s election as leader as an epochal event, finally settling Labour’s commitment to social democracy ...”