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“... is to be found in Gough and Home’s collection of essays, which includes chapters by Douglas Johnson, René Rémond, Julian Jackson, Michel Winock and Serge Berstein. Perhaps the most interesting contribution, however, is Jean-Marie Mayeur’s essay on ‘De Gaulle as Politician and Christian’, for the whole point about de Gaulle was that, although he ...”

“... It was one of the most attractive aspects of Iain Macleod that he was not easily taken for a professional politician. After depressing his hard-working doctor father by getting a lower second at Cambridge, he was quickly sacked from his first job at De la Rue’s, mainly because he found it an almost impossible struggle to get to work in the morning after staying up into the wee hours playing bridge and poker at Crockfords ...”

“... In 1937 a small gas field was discovered near Whitby in Yorkshire. In 1943 in Nazi-occupied Holland drilling began in a search for gas which met success only in July 1959 when the Groningen field was discovered in Friesland. It became clear that Groningen, the world’s second largest gas field, stretched far out into the North Sea and geologists noticed that the strata in which the Dutch deposits were found were actually an undersea extension of a formation which began in Yorkshire ...”

“... What Tory MPs really wanted,’ Margaret Thatcher writes of the Westland affair, ‘was leadership, frankness and a touch of humility, all of which I tried to provide.’ A great deal of indignant energy has fired the reviews of this book, many of them by Mrs Thatcher’s former Cabinet colleagues, largely because of the sheer outrageousness of those claims to frankness and humility ...”

“... According to the New Nation (the nearest thing there is to an ANC newspaper until Tiny Rowland sets up an official one), what really drove Janusz Waluz and Clive and Gaye Derby-Lewis to plot the assassination of the South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani was the belief that Hani was the most likely successor to Nelson Mandela as head of the ANC – and thus the next-President-but-one of South Africa ...”

“... Raymond Williams’s death in January 1988 has been followed by an avalanche of obituarial tribute. To some extent, the tributes were a matter of the Left giving a last, sad cheer for one of its most versatile and prolific heroes. Alan O’Connor’s bibliography of works by and about Williams covers an extraordinary 47 pages and includes 29 critical works, five novels, five short stories and five plays by Williams (which, together, have sold over a million copies in Britain alone), as well as perhaps a thousand articles ...”

“... Tom Nairn has, for many years, been pondering the peculiarities of the British state with impressive intelligence and originality. His earlier work, The Break-Up of Britain, remains a landmark – but had the curious deficiency of devoting relatively little space to England, which is, even from Nairn’s Marxist and Scots nationalist vantage-point, the heart of the matter ...”

“... The Opposition is at a low ebb. Labour consoles itself for its third consecutive thrashing with the thought that at least its leader put up a good show and the Party was well-prepared and ran a good campaign. None of these things was true: Kinnock trailed Thatcher massively in the leader polls and was far less popular than his party; the campaign, largely a matter of a few videos and avoiding the London press, was good only in comparison to Foot’s; and the Party was so ill-prepared that, despite four years of reflection, it was still chronically unsure even about such key issues as its taxation policy ...”

“... Nelson Mandela, incarcerated for over a quarter of a century, writes frequently to his wife, Winnie, about his vivid and often rather frightening dreams.   I dreamt I was with the young men of the kraal. They gave me herbs to strengthen me against you. They were saying that I should fight with you so that you would run away. And you were shouting at me to throw away those leaves, they were bad medicine ...”

“... Getting to Dave Lewis’s farm was not easy, even though I had instructions.* Travelling any distance out of Harare is fairly tense stuff because you can never be sure you’ll have enough fuel to get back (I freewheeled on all the downhill stretches, keeping a careful eye on the engine revs) – not to mention what’s been happening on Mashonaland farms these last three months ...”

“... No book in recent South African history has attracted such venom as Anthea Jeffery’s analysis of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She has been accused of wanting to defend the apartheid past, of having a desire to hurt and humiliate black people and of much else besides. Yet none of her attackers has dared to take issue with her on the basis of fact or evidence – Jeffery’s scholarship is beyond reproach ...”

“... John Weightman, reviewing Jean-Denis Bredin’s monumental work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that ‘it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abscess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century.’ It is, perhaps, a curious notion that there could be any time when it would be ‘a good thing’ for a country to experience a racking political scandal which, over a 12-year period, led to the unparalleled expression of group hatreds, brought about suicides, the ruination of careers and the fall of governments, and which produced anti-semitic riots without number in which Jews were robbed, vilified and killed ...”

“... There were plenty of stories, during the Queen’s visit to South Africa, about black radio commentators who talked of ‘Queen Elizabeth Eleven’ and her husband, the ‘Duke of Ellington’. The people who told you the stories were always white and they had never heard the commentator themselves; either ‘a friend’ had, or they’d ‘heard’ that it had happened, thus confirming that one, and possibly two, comfortable old South African realities were still in place ...”

“... of the EC and the Soviet bloc – we were geographic partners and we had the technology, they the raw materials – but my hard-headed middle managers would have none of it. There could, they said, be no Eurasia without the re-unification of Germany and the collapse of Communism, both of which were inconceivable. These were simply fixed points. Today no one ...”

“... By the time Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 the nuanced position he took on the Algerian revolution had caused a scandal in orthodox progressive circles. Camus kept as quiet as he could because he feared terrorist reprisals against his mother, who was still living in Algiers. At the Nobel ceremony, however, he was harangued by an FLN enthusiast and forced into making a statement ...”