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“... Hitler only later bestowed his approval. To this debate two British writers, David Irving and Gerald Fleming, have contributed thunderous points. Irving claims, what no respectable German author has claimed, that not only was Hitler not the author of the ‘final solution’: he did not even know about it until 1943. He thought the Jews were being ...”

“... supposed to be able to mix easily with diplomats and foreign ministers. In 1933 the Etonian Ian Fleming – ‘his appearance is good, and his manners are agreeable’ – covered the show trials in Moscow of the Vickers engineers. ‘Moscow, Wednesday. As the famous clock on the Kremlin Tower strikes 12 the six Metropolitan-Vickers English employees will ...”

“... 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 mugging ...”

“... with the Red Cross in France. There, a few months before Syrie’s pregnancy, he had also met Gerald Haxton, a louche American expatriate who became the most important man in his life. Maugham eventually married Syrie for the child’s sake – their daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1915 – but he continued to see Haxton. Gossip proliferated. Maugham, it ...”