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“... that came before him. And BBC managers are unsackable. In the recent judgment on the Cliff Richard case, besides criticising the rationale behind broadcasting the story in the first place (which, typically enough, was in part to avoid criticism for not broadcasting it), the judge found that the UK news editor was not a reliable witness and that the ...”

“... anachronistic, antiqued model of “good literature”’; he quoted the naturalist Richard Mabey, who, like Fisher, had known and loved that coast for years. To read Sebald, according to Mabey, was to watch the belittlement of ‘a very close friend’.Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was published towards the ...”

“... able to work 25 hours in every 24, dubbed ‘Steelhammer’ by Senator Quayle’s buddy Robert Owen, firing off memos from his state-of-the-art crisis centre in the White House. And then there was Oliver North the thug, drafting directives that authorised CIA operatives ‘to “neutralise” terrorists’, supporting ‘pre-emptive strikes’ against Arab ...”

“... controls that voice? What does it echo, in the long history of warfare examined by John Keegan and Richard Holmes in their book-of-the-television-series, Soldiers? It looks to me as if fighting men have adhered to perhaps half a dozen different codes. There is the ‘rape and pillage’ style: a gang of men sets off to plunder a wealthy place, seize ...”

“... ruthless kings rebuilt it (Edward III, then Henry V), infuriatingly self-indulgent kings lost it (Richard II, then Henry VI). The uselessness of the two latter monarchs had led to their murder by ambitious would-be replacements; nobility had been so unimpressed by the victims’ performance on the throne that they stood aside and let the assassinations ...”

“... was his rejection of the name his parents had given him: from his teens he called himself Richard. A sparkling-eyed poet who played rugby at school, he caught the eye of many women. In his youth he had a taste for velvet jackets and bow ties; he had studied some Greek, and relished the Romantic Hellenism of Keats’s Endymion, whose famous first line ...”

“... after reading the opening chapters of a novel by the protagonist of What a Carve Up!, Michael Owen (not the footballer). Michael, the author of Accidents Will Happen and The Loving Touch, is too experienced to be more than mildly affronted when a student finds his work insufficiently radical, but if his books are anything like Coe’s first two ...”

“... of his team, has now been announced as a top adviser to his opponent in the leadership contest, Owen Smith. Despite all this, Corbyn seems likely to defeat Smith, possibly with an even larger share of the vote than he received last year. As his personal ratings have plunged, Labour’s membership has shot up – it now stands at more than 500,000 – making ...”

“... least its dedicated mourner. He has written a polemic against John Major’s Government and David Owen, the EU mediator in the remains of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, for their connivance in the ferocious dismantling of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is keen on Major’s New Labour successors, and confident that Tony Blair’s support for the Milosevic indictment ...”

“... got stuck in the allegedly golden years of good King Clem. Michael Foot – though, together with Richard Crossman, he was wrongly excluded from the Attlee Government – is one such. In consequence, Foot the politician is not fully integrated with Foot the man. Whereas the rest of Foot is clever, subtle, charming, broad-minded and living in the present, Foot ...”

“... the other poets dutifully soldiered on until the end – or their end. Four of them – Blunden, Owen, Read and Sassoon – won the Military Cross. Robert Graves’s hard saying might stand as their watchword: ‘the only way out of the war is the way through it.’ Intellectually, they had much in common with pacifist Bloomsbury, but they had bound ...”

“... present, whom nobody would dream of calling hacks. Nor were the results deplorable. Such books as Richard Jefferies have received the accolade from notoriously captious critics. He sometimes referred to himself as a hack, but in the spirit of certain characters in Cold Comfort Farm who defined themselves as used rinds, gourds and wounded maggots, but meant it ...”

“... on the topic, though it is always near at hand. The most surprising contribution is an essay on Richard Strauss, who certainly had spent a long life studying ‘the possibilities’. He set some well-known stylistic puzzles: Elektra belongs to 1909, the same date as Schoenberg’s Erwartung, yet the more traditional Der Rosenkavalier followed in 1911. There ...”

“... of the man stays stamped on his photographed features till the end – strongly marked in Richard Avedon’s famous portrait of 1969. Vera passes photographically through the book like royalty, always exuding grace, joy and beauty. Igor’s snapshot of her by a lake in Wiesbaden in 1930 is particularly fetching, with the remote glow of a legend. The ...”

“... of the Revolution were mainly Communist sympathisers like Edgar Snow, Anna Louise Strong and Owen Lattimore. After the gruesomeness of the war in Korea, their expertise was at a discount and the State Department was purged of the sort of people who might, if they had stuck around, have helped avert the inane policies that eventuated in the Vietnam ...”