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“... ultimately be judged and defined by what he does.’ A journalist who may be closer to events, Peter Snowdon ends his book on a more equivocal note: ‘If the last four and a half years have been testing for Cameron’s Conservative Party,’ he writes, ‘the next few will be far harder, whether the party wins or loses.’ Not that Snowdon is in any doubt ...”

“... on. This was just one of the domestic surprises that came in the wake of 11 September. Another was Peter Mandelson’s strangely off-key suggestion that the secret services should be recruiting in Bradford rather than St James’s (apparently on the grounds that immigrants would find it easier than Old Etonians to disguise themselves as Islamic ...”

“... does not always agree) that his investigation was deliberately and continually impeded by the Bush Administration. The close proximity of Bush to Irangate and now to Iraqgate makes that seem very likely. For British readers, however, the Senator’s report is at its most powerful when it deals with the Bank of ...”

“... rejected by our more powerful pundits of musical taste’ – Hans Keller, William Glock and Peter Heyworth. For someone like Keller, the gatekeeper of the debate about new music in the 1960s and 1970s, Cardew was a godsend: Keller might not agree with what he wrote, but he enjoyed orchestrating the subsequent controversy. Cardew became known not just as ...”

“... relatively indifferent to the sex of the authors she’s dealing with. But in Eagleton-eyed Peter Gibbons, who wrote the chapter on non-fiction, Sturm found someone in tune with his editorial song. ‘Writing,’ Gibbons tells us, ‘like Marx’s capital, arrives in New Zealand “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and ...”

“... The Sun’s obsession with nuclear weapons (LET’S NUKE ‘EM. GET READY TO PUSH THE BUTTON, BUSH TOLD – headline, 8 January) is of long standing. No doubt the Daily Telegraph’s enthusiastic support for the war was predictable. That paper’s former editor, William Deedes, an archetypal buffer who once dealt expertly with press relations for the Tory ...”

“... to the heart of the old Australia – another (and equally serviceable) version of Les Murray’s bush-Romanticism. ‘She wanted to be back among those country faces ... She wanted to feed numbly on them. From the present, poisoned world, she wanted to track back with the help of those faces to the safer Australia ... where people called lunch dinner and ...”

“... are successful abroad is that they shall give a leg up to their fellow-countrymen. A few do so; Peter Porter has been most generous, and Clive James has come to the task more recently, but also with generosity. In this vivacious and often sumptuous new collection of his essays, he has a great deal to say in praise of fellow expatriates, and some magnanimous ...”

“... on the belief that the word ‘history’ stood for ‘hiss-Tory’, but the recent work of Peter Clarke, for example, has shown how much these difficulties were part of the central experience of a generation. The other great refuge of liberal optimism, in 1914 as in 1867, was education. It is hard to read Russell On Education without seeing that the ...”

“... patiently, for it to end – if he could just make comrades of them. This translation by Duncan Bush is from The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems. The first couple of lines set the scene in a distanced, rather offhand way. But then (and this is what is striking) the language stops feeling like a description of the man’s struggle and starts to seem ...”

“... dedicated to Milgram: empowerment … taking responsibility), as well as being the source for a Peter Gabriel song entitled ‘We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)’. A French punk rock group called Milgram put out a CD called Vierhundertfünfzig Volt (‘450 Volts’). A British band called Midget issued The Milgram Experiment. Plays have been written ...”

“... than Karen Blixen. He was equally at ease with books, at the ballet in Paris or in the African bush, where he, too, found pleasure in the freedom from convention. He farmed, traded with the Masai and became a white hunter, taking the Prince of Wales out twice on safari. Karen Blixen writes to her mother that ‘he has a magical effect on me; never have I ...”

“... heightened idea of itself and the unsatisfactory lives of its citizens, particularly in the Reagan-Bush era, is the condition which underlies Sachs’s personal crusade. Auster brilliantly works his readers through a kaleidoscopic combination of highly-charged relationships, events, situations and developments: the husband reading his wife’s chillingly ...”

“... personal adventures and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, not to mention Redmond O’Hanlon, assume to be the heart of travel writing. This leads us to the reflection that travel writing, or anyway the best sort, only pretends to be informative. The author, out of self-respect, and by ...”

“... argued that that a second resolution would be required – as had the attorney general, Sir Peter Goldsmith. Tony Blair himself had tried to secure a second resolution. But then, just as the negotiations for a second resolution – handled by Greenstock – failed, the attorney general changed his view, declaring that Resolution 1441 itself revived the ...”