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“... was a convert to imperialism. That ‘Radical Joe’ would transform himself, in the words of Winston Churchill, from Fiery Red to True Blue was a change beyond the wit of political pundits to predict. But then, no one could possibly have predicted the explosive impact of the Irish question on political alignments. In 1886, Gladstone declared in favour of ...”

“... on building sites or sitting in their own kitchens or living-rooms. Many, like David McQuillan, Winston McCaughey, Ritchie Latimer, Albert Beacom, Robert Bennett, Thomas Loughran and James McFall were with their children when they were attacked. William Gordon’s 10-year-old-daughter, Lesley, and seven-year-old son, ...”

“... It will be predictably edifying, or perhaps predictably unedifying: in any case, predictable. Richard Rorty is a philosopher for whom the standards and the point of getting it right have become very problematic, not only in philosophy but quite generally. In his influential and interesting book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in 1979, he ...”

“... Because so many are so ready to protest so much over anything not entirely uncritical written of Winston in World War Two (or WWW2 for short), there was no possibility whatever that Charmley’s 648 pages for 30 quid would pass by quietly, attracting deadly praise of ‘the best one-volume Churchill biography published this ...”

“... already the author of his major works. The Foundation nonetheless took a big punt on the genius of Richard Powers, who was awarded his MacArthur in 1989, aged only 32. I haven’t checked, but he is probably the youngest novelist ever to win a fellowship. Generally unknown in 1989, and temperamentally reticent, he has lately divulged something of his personal ...”

“... devising the ERP and ensuring it was carried out: Marshall himself, William Clayton, Paul Hoffman, Richard Bissell and Arthur Vandenberg. All are portrayed as extraordinarily talented, dedicated and selfless individuals who acted out of a classical sense of republican virtue and, like Cincinnatus or George Washington, returned to private life at the first ...”

“... the maiden speech for which he was instantly awarded the Garter. When I joined, I discovered that Richard Adrian is quite right: it is like a prep school. There are any number of corridors down which to get lost. Nobody tells you how to find the Gents, and you’re too shy to ask. The rituals are as arcane to the newcomer as they are familiar to the old ...”

“... of two interviews with Hitler allegedly conducted in 1931 by a senior newspaper editor called Richard Breiting, and subsequently supposedly buried by him in a canister in his garden because he feared for his life should they be discovered. The interviews showed Hitler was making plans to burn the Reichstag two years before the event. ‘In my ...”

“... in the bombings. Johnny Walker said he had a lighted cigarette pushed into a blister in his foot; Richard McIlkenny said that he was suffocated under a blanket. The brutality, the men alleged, continued as they were driven, barefoot and terrified, to Birmingham on the day after the bombings. At Queen’s Road station, they all said, the violence ...”

“... about Aneurin Bevan, E.P. Thompson about William Morris and (ridiculously) Boris Johnson about Winston Churchill? The problem is rather that identification has led Holmes to echo, rather than analyse and explain, Pankhurst’s own version of her story. The first two-thirds of the book are based almost exclusively on Pankhurst’s writings, but without ...”

“... On 5 July 1953, three weeks before the end of the Korean War, Winston Churchill was about to step out onto the croquet lawn with his doctor, Lord Moran, and with Field Marshal Montgomery, when Monty asked him: ‘What is our policy in Korea? It is no good making war without a policy.’ Churchill replied with a reference to the President of South Korea: If I were in charge, I would withdraw the United Nations troops to the coast and leave Syngman Rhee to the Chinese ...”

“... worries unduly about this. There were many Sphinxes about in the Nineties. One of them appeared to Richard le Gallienne as he sat in a restaurant eating whitebait, others to Gustave Moreau and to Khnopff. Nor would I agree with Sally Beauman that the tone of the Sphinx’s novels is ‘unmistakably descended from Jane Austen’. It seems to me much more nearly ...”

“... of an American intelligence officer. The first, published ten years ago, was Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA. Long before Scott was named the Agency’s chief of station in Mexico City he had known Angleton in London during the war when both were working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor of the ...”

“... For some reason, Read was particularly touched by what he saw as Pound’s change of heart towards Winston Churchill. The Pisan stockade remained on active service in literary criticism for rather longer than it did in the US army’s penal system. The opening paragraphs of the relevant chapter in Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971) read like an extract from ...”

“... instructive sign of the times. When Churchill died in 1965, we thought we were burying the past. Richard Crossman, a reluctant mourner at the funeral, wrote afterwards: ‘It felt like the end of an epoch, possibly even the end of a nation.’ But what era feels more remote today than that of Wilson and Heath, the great modernisers for whom modernity failed ...”