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“... not that of his predecessor, Gina Haspel. Perhaps it would be too torture-heavy to be published.Catherine Ashton’s memoir offers neither brutal candour nor aristocratic irony. Instead, she aspires to sincerity. Ashton, like Pompeo, wasn’t a professional diplomat: hers was a typical New Labour career. After a ...”

“... within a tight geographical space, which makes events easier to visualise, and so more dramatic. Ashton takes on a broader canvas, with mixed results. Hers is a crowded scene, more like Frith’s The Derby Day, the sensational success of 1858’s Royal Academy exhibition, so popular that a policeman had to be deployed to hold back the crowds. Frith had ...”

“... Two very different books by two professors at English universities. That written by Professor Ashton is a bad book of a kind that is all too common, that by Professor Scarisbrick is good, perhaps very good, but of a kind that is now all too rare, in that it was written for the simple, old fashioned reason that its author was passionately interested in imparting his views ...”

“... I am probably one of the 20 people in America who know his name. His appointment, like that of Catherine Ashton, the EU’s new High Representative for Foreign Affairs, is a catastrophe. It’s often said that Europe will continue to be unable to translate its economic power and its very big and positive institutional example into political power in ...”

“... however, just an older woman. For Charles Perrault and the contemporary women writers, like Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, who took up the genre, fairies – les fées – behaved and looked like grand court ladies; the crone played the part of the storyteller, or the beggar woman sent to test the heroine’s sweet nature, or the granny who gets eaten by the ...”