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“... We owe much to your country,’ the Anglican archbishop of Uganda told Patrick Marnham shortly before being shot in 1977. ‘We need you, and not just your knowledge; we need your fellowship. Most people here know this. What we have become, you made us.’ The tragedy of this statement suffuses Fantastic Invasion, the record Patrick Marnham brought back with him from a series of visits to West and East Africa ...”

“... as a child. As a result, her life was a constant search for security, and this was to be, in Marnham’s view, a dominating factor in the formation of her son’s personality. A younger brother, Christian, was born in 1906. After a chequered career he was killed in Vietnam in 1947 while serving with the French Foreign Legion.The German occupation of ...”

“... other flourishing firms, boasts a pension scheme and a company villa in the Dordogne. Secondly, as Patrick Marnham demonstrates in the course of his amiable and rambling volume, the magazine has always been a highly permeable organisation. Where once its politics were leftish, its stance investigative, and its key influence Paul Foot, now its politics are ...”

“... by the success of Abstract Expressionism, signifying a decisive defection from engagé figuration. Patrick Marnham enjoys Rivera’s murals, and describes them well, but he ignores or trivialises the wider aesthetic and political issues. Incredibly, he never mentions the Mexican School of Painting, which owed so much to Rivera’s style. He is more ...”

“... was found in the US mailbag at 46 Lower Belgrave Street in London there has been no new evidence. Patrick Marnham’s only novelty is the evidence from Taki, the Spectator gossip-columnist, to the effect that he knew Lucky Lucan had a powerboat and had made dummy runs with an eight-stone sack to the coast. That fits with Lucan’s remarks to Greville ...”

“... Robert Brasillach pointed out in 1943 that it was an ideal setting for detective stories, and Patrick Marnham’s gripping book is a detective story of sorts. It recounts the life of a man who was, in himself, particularly opaque. Jean Moulin was ambitious and devious. He exploited every possible political connection to advance his career and by 1937 ...”

“... intrigued by the personalities of contributors to the magazine, Messrs Waugh, West, Gillard and Marnham, and would have liked to have been editor of Private Eye. Goldsmith’s aversion to the Eye certainly seems to have been different from the conventional dislike. It may have touched off fears of a deep and dangerous conspiracy against himself. ‘ “Is ...”

“... when he was 18. It’s never been translated, but according to Simenon’s excellent biographer Patrick Marnham it’s a would-be humorous story about his home town, Liège, ‘partly set in a chemist’s shop which specialised in laxatives for pigeons’. Over the next few years, under a variety of pseudonyms, he wrote 150 or so pulp books, mainly of ...”

“... à trois. Simenon was mapping out futures, more or less tormented, for the three of them. As Patrick Marnham remarks in his excellent 1994 biography, ‘the account of the experience became part of the experience.’ Neither woman headed for the door. Simenon by this time was a multimillionaire. How does Inspector Maigret fit into all this? For if ...”

“... question a total hunchback population of 13. This is the most felicitous use of statistics since Patrick Marnham’s account of the Lucan case. (Noting that Lucan, in his days as an inhouse gambler at the Clermont Club, ate nothing but lamb cutlets, summer and winter, Marnham worked out the approximate number of sheep ...”