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“... obituary when he was killed in Kenya in 1953 during the Mau-Mau rebellion. William ‘Strafer’ Gott, my father’s cousin, was a general in the Western Desert under Wavell, appointed by Churchill to run the Eighth Army in 1942 and then immediately killed on his way to Cairo (and replaced by Bernard Montgomery). Penderel Moon, my mother’s brother, a ...”

“... Although I had lived for some of the previous decade in Santiago, I was not in Chile on 11 September 1973, the day 25 years ago when the government of Salvador Allende was overthrown. I was sitting in the Guardian’s old building in the Grays Inn Road when the news came in over the wires, but could not immediately fly to Chile, having a longstanding engagement to drive my family from Sussex to Yorkshire to establish them in a new home ...”

“... avant-garde – Webern, Boulez and Stockhausen – to which his contemporaries Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett were also drawn. The mecca for music students in those days was Stockhausen’s headquarters at Darmstadt, where the ‘Darmstadt Headbangers’, as Tom Lubbock describes them, treated Britten and Shostakovich with derision as ...”

“... At one end of the desolate park that stretches down from the public buildings of Asunción to the bay adjacent to the Paraguay River, where conquistadors first found refuge in the 16th century, stands a strange construction of concrete and metal that looks more like a contemporary artwork than a memorial. Scrambled within the cement are bronze hands sticking out and an upturned human face, crushed beneath an immense cube of concrete: the destroyed remains of the statue of General Alfredo Stroessner, one of the infamous dictators of the second half of the 20th century ...”

“... suddenly found themselves denounced by their students. A decent liberal anthropologist called Richard Newbold Adams, the doyen of US Guatemalan studies at the time and a distinguished professor at Austin, Texas, had worked in the rural areas in the Fifties and wrote a US Government-funded study entitled Receptivity to Communist-Fomented Agitation in Rural ...”

“... on slave labour imported from Africa. In a chapter on the development of the Caribbean islands, Richard Sheridan underestimates the role of slave labour. ‘The New World plantation represented the capitalistic exploitation of land,’ he writes, ‘with a combination of African labour, European technology and management, Asiatic and American ...”

“... The mountains of Venezuela rise up almost sheer from the shores of the Caribbean, with gashes of red earth below and vivid green forest above, the peaks entirely lost in grey cloud. From the aeroplane window I have often liked to imagine this as the land on which the local Indians stood when they first discovered Columbus on their beach in 1498 – although he landed some four hundred miles to the east, on the Peninsula de Paría, across the water from Trinidad ...”

“... accounts of Guevara’s impact on the conference, and his inconclusive private discussions with Richard Goodwin, one of Kennedy’s advisers. But this is well-trodden ground, and there is little new material. Many Latin American governments were still run by civilians, and under popular pressure to extend the hand of friendship to Cuba. But the American ...”

“... crimes of the British long after the empire has been abandoned. The latest to join the list are Richard Gott and Partha Chatterjee. Gott, who describes himself as ‘a historian in private practice’, has written a wide-ranging study of resistance to British rule in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, North America and the ...”

“... I could get a flight to La Paz and a connection to Europe via Brazil. Hearing me reminisce with Richard Gott, who was also defending humanity, and who had been the Guardian’s chief Latin America correspondent in 1967, a young Telesur journalist from Madrid said: ‘God. It’s just like listening to Spanish Civil War veterans returning to ...”

“... talked to anyone in the past week or so who doesn’t believe that this was and is true of Richard Gott. I don’t say this with any sense or intention of accommodating to the prevailing wind, since Gott has disliked me intensely for more than twenty years and last January wrote a loopy letter to this ...”

“... from American examples. If tragic and passionate stories were alone enough to make a book, Richard Gott’s Land without Evil would be equally good. As he shunts up and down improbable South American railway lines, Gott recalls and retells the journeys of some of the travellers – mainly 17th and 18th-century ...”

“... occupation and living wage (a black-humoured task dreamt up for my convalescence by the well-named Richard Gott) arrived 22 years late: in 1968 I sent a memorandum to the then editor proposing a daily warts-and-all profile of a man or woman lately dead – in other words, a Not-the-Times obituary column. Now it is universally agreed in the four serious ...”

“... to Moscow less out of ideological alignment than because he didn’t have much of an ideology. As Richard Gott writes in his history of Cuba:When the Cuban revolutionaries came to run the country they were at a loss … First they tried one thing, then another: they imported foreign economists; they tried import-substitution; they sought ...”

“... could have helped discredit a cause larger than himself in much the same way as the wretched Richard Gott recently managed, on a smaller scale, to do), waited until 1982 to publish his book After Long Silence. It told the usual story: the high excitement of the Thirties; the precedence given in Cambridge circles to young men of background and pelf ...”