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“... hotel’ of residents whose ‘lives revolved around the President and First Lady’. Winston Churchill cabled Clement Attlee on one of his own stays at the White House: ‘We live here as a big family, in the greatest intimacy and familiarity.’ Closest Companion and No Ordinary Time make us guests at the White House as well, visitors who know a ...”

“... The collective rate of encroachment on our hosts’ wine supply is truly awesome. I am reminded of Winston Churchill saying to my father about his – my father’s – teetotal father, who had been a colleague of Churchill’s in Asquith’s Cabinet: ‘I have often thought that your father would have been a happier man if he had taken an occasional glass of ...”

“... CIA was a Soviet spy. After such sleuthing it is a relief to find in this book of essays edited by Richard Langhorne an article on the Cambridge spies by a don, and it is by far the most sensible account so far written. It is the best because Christopher Andrew is a historian at Corpus Christi, Cambridge who has become the leading authority on the Intelligence ...”

“... means two things: first, the new History must be consciously British, and secondly (borrowing from Winston Churchill), it should focus on Britain’s world position primarily with reference to the ‘three circles’ of Europe, the Empire and the United States. This is no doubt unoriginal, and some of it is confused; but it does supply a beginning from which a ...”

“... was the class-solvent and the 1939 war the social propellant. From Oxford onwards, Heath sat at Winston Churchill’s feet and was rewarded. At 21, having taken the anti-appeasement line in student debates, he was invited to the Savoy Hotel. Lunch in the River Room, he insouciantly writes, was postponed by Hitler’s annexation of Austria, but Churchill ...”

“... to the mark. All the tropical products except cotton were deleterious or, at best, useless. As in Richard Dunn’s book, we are given gruesome details about the vicious, often sadistic regime of the plantations which produced them. Speaking of the Antigua revolt of 1736, Calder discusses, as others have been doing lately, the general puzzle of whether raw ...”

“... to Britain. Presciently buying government shares in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) in 1913, Winston Churchill had managed to ensure that 84 per cent of its profits came to Britain. In 1933, Reza Khan, a self-educated soldier who had made use of the postwar chaos to grab power and found a new ruling dynasty (much to Mossadegh’s disgust), negotiated a ...”

“... O-level English, so that stayed. Nineteen Eighty-Four was suspect, because of the scene between Winston and Julia among the bluebells, but it was a school copy, so that had to stay too. I also threw out half my records and tapes and ceased wearing eccentric clothes. I stopped having silly haircuts and removed my earring. I started attending a church youth ...”

“... is missing, but anxious that people should not suspect that it is his integrity. The career of Richard Crossman refuted these stereotypes rather in the manner that Samuel Johnson, by stubbing his foot against a rock, claimed to refute Berkeley: what was lost as a formal exercise was pure gain as an object lesson. For Crossman remained incorrigibly attached ...”

“... He had written to many of the notables of the day to tell them the good news – a mixed bag: Winston Churchill, Semprini, Wilfred Pickles, Val Doonican – and he would show you a sheaf of their acknowledgments. ‘He’s batchy,’ Dad would say, meaning ‘he’s barmy,’ but it certainly kept him happy.7 February. Ploughing on with the Francis Bacon ...”

“... thing. I was just screaming. Listen to “a wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom”’ – a Little Richard vocal line (garbled) from ‘Tutti Frutti’. ‘Don’t get the therapy confused with the music.’ And what’s true (and ‘simple’ and ‘real’) of the voice is also true of the instrument: How do you rate yourself as a guitarist? Well, it ...”

“... recent scandalous split from his wife, Sarah Churchill, the prime minister’s daughter. (Winston Churchill had always been appalled by the marriage and described Oliver as ‘common as dirt’.) That’s not to say there was no subtext. Oliver was Jewish and said to be on a Nazi blacklist. His final choice of record, ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, made ...”

“... In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the ...”

“... is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been ...”

“... German killed (elsewhere it had been even worse: fifty for every German). Kappler – played by Richard Burton in George P. Cosmatos’s film Massacre in Rome (1973) – had to come up with names very quickly: the killings were to be carried out within 24 hours of the attack. In the film we see Burton at a desk, adding the names of political prisoners, men ...”