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“... their zen aridity, will have to be used to sell the cables buried beneath the unsuspecting ground. Dick File’s Weather Watch, with foreword by Ian McCaskill (who, according to Bill Giles, broadcasts in his bare feet), is a no-nonsense trot in teasingly accessible segments through the excitements of the British weather: carbon dioxide ‘sinks’, Chaos ...”

“... like an election winner for some years. At least as important is the attitude of the rank-and-file activists who choose the Party’s Parliamentary candidates. If the age of deference is dead, it is a great deal deader in this segment of the population than in any other. That the Attlee and Wilson governments had such a heavy complement of Oxbridge ...”

“... In a recent interview, Kurt Vonnegut rated his latest novel, Deadeye Dick, at B-. The gesture is disarming, and no doubt his critics will conclude that he has got it just about right. But if we start from the tacit assumption that Deadeye Dick is not a masterpiece, whether or not it becomes a best-seller, we can concentrate our minds on what it is that makes Vonnegut’s style of storytelling so distinctively beguiling ...”

“... Leviathan and Behemoth; but also ones called Coal of Impurity, Concupiscence, Fornication, Dog’s Dick – this translation of Caudacanis is to be preferred to Dog’s Tail, which is the more usual, literal rendering.) Loudun became a tourist attraction, the theatre of possession the most exciting and puzzling of public spectacles. The demons testified that ...”

“... get plans for rocket sites and the names of German technicians: a story familiar from The Odessa File, where the private dick with the black and yellow-striped Mercedes is obliged to display his uncircumcised penis to the Odessa chief as bona fides. Here, too, is The Murderers Among Us, Simon Wiesenthal’s account of the ...”

“... from right to left adds enormously to the value of Tony Benn’s Diaries. His contemporaries Dick Grossman and Barbara Castle have also published diaries. Others have written autobiographies. All are full of evidence of the impotence of office. Even Denis Healey in his recent popular autobiography admits that the notorious ‘IMF cuts’ in 1976 were ...”

“... to know, but it mostly neglected the point that as a source of knowledge about political events, Dick Crossman’s testimony – even his testimony to himself – needed, to put it mildly, a good deal of interpretation. His individual and sometimes malign preoccupations provided no surrogate for a Cabinet Hansard. It can rightly be said that more ...”

“... was driven to write because there was absolutely no company for her in Palmer’s Green. When Kay Dick interviewed her in 1970, Stevie complained about her photographs. ‘They make me look dead, and as if I’d been dead for a long time. I haven’t got a thing about age, but I do rather have a thing about looking dead and buried.’ She made no particular ...”

“... enclosures and the unknowable within, is an obsession second only to skin). How can Beatrice now file away her early fantasy about the bald boy as a kind of glorious, lethal dick – ‘so that if, unlike her parents, she couldn’t live for love, she could at least die from it’? She can only reconcile herself to the ...”

“... stuff about his being detached, laid-back, shruggy. As it is, they reach for the received-opinion file – which doesn’t have anything in it about the not at all rare phenomenon of the New Age German – and draw a blank. But the long-distance thing is a hoot. I think this trend should be encouraged. After the World Cup, when Steve McClaren takes over the ...”

“... assignment – by timing his or her own demise, preferably over a bank holiday with a picture on file and a book of memoirs in the library, or a contemporary at hand with a few good stories to tell about the subject’s foibles. This can be overdone, of course. After the recent death of one hack – an admired hack, but all the same – about three thousand ...”

“... son of undistinguished Conservative MPs, Thorpe was educated at Eton and Oxford, where he defeated Dick Taverne (later a Labour MP) and William Rees-Mogg (later the editor of the Times) for the Union presidency. Like one of his successors as Liberal leader, Charles Kennedy, he became an MP at a young age and came to public notice through his entertaining ...”

“... usually as NCOs or junior officers. This applied to hardly more than one in twenty of the rank and file. Differences between leaders and led play an important part in Fischer’s interpretation. He argues that the SA as a whole constituted a much more proletarian body than has usually been accepted, and that this offers a key to its awkward political status ...”

“... the Met commissioner – the force’s most senior officer, appointed last summer after Cressida Dick was pressured by politicians into resigning – has vowed to ‘lead the renewal of policing by consent, which has been so heavily dented in recent years as trust and confidence have fallen’.Braverman’s comments make more sense if they’re understood as ...”

“... Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar. He is a pillar of strength in a city of weak men. You will rely on him time and time again to maintain security. He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in’: thus Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, 1968. It is not often that a book casts fresh light on American history throughout this century, but this biography of Edgar Hoover does just that ...”