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“... place she grew up in. Patrick O’Brian’s stories of Napoleonic sea war have a vivacity which Hugh Thomas’s more fitfully imaginative book lacks, but both have virtues which come directly from the fact that the substantial historical scaffolds which they have erected give their players room to move. The Letter of Marque opens with Jack Aubrey ...”

“... foreboding. In November 1982 he wrote to Motion about a dinner held for Thatcher by the historian Hugh Thomas and attended by writers he thought she might admire (Larkin, Isaiah Berlin, V.S. Pritchett, Mario Vargas Llosa and Anthony Powell, among others), which Larkin had found tough going. ‘The Thatcher dinner was pretty grisly. Even now I shudder and ...”

“... in the 18th century.’ He went to Eton and read English at Cambridge, where he met Nick Tomalin, Hugh Thomas, Mark Boxer and Neal Ascherson. Among the enduring friendships of his student years was that of the founding editor of the LRB, Karl Miller. McEwen and his wife, Romana, later went on a road trip with Karl and his wife, Jane, through the Blue ...”

“... European Parliament, John Prescott and I were ‘educated in the ways of Upper Whitehall’ by Sir Thomas Brimelow, the former PUS at the Foreign Office, who became a Labour Peer and a British representative at Strasbourg. But it is no surprise to me that in over twenty years as an MP I have met my contemporary Sir Clive Whitmore only once. That was when I had ...”

“... answer is that while it has not greatly changed the outlines of the story as told by Paul Johnson, Hugh Thomas and a succession of memoirists, it begins to make possible a different type of account. It is only a beginning because the parallel French, Israeli, Egyptian and even, with very considerable exceptions, American papers are either not yet ...”

“... homes, became the main alternative to demolition. Salvation came from the Labour Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, in 1946. A great walker, Dalton was more interested in open spaces than country houses. But by creating the National Land Fund for the acquisition of houses in lieu of death duties, he set in motion the transfer of many stately homes to public ...”

“... a Social Democrat. In the Labour Party, he may be thought a hostile witness. So, undoubtedly, will Hugh Thomas, who contributes a rather slapdash opening chapter, and Paul Johnson, who writes far more cogently on ‘The British Left, Trade Unions and Democracy’. But their findings, like those of Butler and Marquand, have been overtaken and confirmed by ...”

“... Younger’ in Spender’s autobiography, ‘Harry Watson’ by Worsley and ‘a secretary’ by Hugh Thomas in his history of the Spanish Civil War). The relationship went sour, Spender married, and Tony-Jimmy-Harry, fired by the doctrines he had picked up from his intellectual friends, enlisted in the International Brigade. In Spain, he was ...”

“... do get José Harris on Beveridge, James Lees-Milne on Harold Nicolson, O.S. Nock on Stanier, and Hugh Thomas on John Strachey. In such circumstances, where the great have already received the supreme accolade, there is little new to add. Much more interesting are the accounts of the otherwise unbiographied men and women of second rank, such as ...”

“... untrue. It would have been impossible for Eden to disregard in the same way The Suez Affair by Hugh Thomas – Thomas is the son-in-law of Gladwyn Jebb, who was Ambassador in Paris at the time – or No End of a Lesson by Sir Anthony Nutting, who was Minister of State at the Foreign Office. Both books were published ...”

“... Spanish Civil War, published in the mid-Fifties. The massive volumes on the Civil War produced by Hugh Thomas and Burnett Bolloten in the Sixties left most Soviet sources untapped because neither could read Russian. Since that time a good deal of secondary literature based on Soviet archival material has appeared in the Soviet Union, filling in gaps and ...”

“... who set reason against feeling and convention against homosexual impulse, but unlike the youthful Hugh Walpole (one of the earliest kittens to fluster Benson with his friskiness) or Eton masters like William Johnson Cory and Oscar Browning, his fear of sex was so great that he could keep his footing in the ‘precarious trade’ of schoolmastering and avoid ...”

“... it had been at Fettes on 5 November 1956, at the very height of the crisis, that an effigy of Hugh Gaitskell (a Wykehamist, and leader of the Labour Party in its opposition to war) was burned, in order to remind the boys what treachery still meant. This event would have been part of the folk memory of the school when the young Anthony Blair, then still a ...”

“... not changed in their fundamentals. In 1943, Robert Oppenheimer assigned its production to Charles Thomas, central research director of the Monsanto chemical company. He set up a laboratory in the indoor tennis court of his mother-in-law’s large and remote estate in Dayton, Ohio. The polonium was made by irradiating slugs of bismuth metal in one of the new ...”

“... Described as a biography, this is also a detective story. Repeatedly Hugh Greene’s BBC colleagues are quoted, anonymously, as being unsure as to what were or are his values, his principles, his philosophy. Occasionally someone doubts if there were or are any. Once, we are told, in an oblique attempt to find a clue to the elusive pattern of his motives, he was asked to say with whom in the English Civil War he could identify himself ...”