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“... not deliver everything it promised. That it accomplished nearly half of this list is remarkable. William Shawcross, who has already written two important books on Cambodia, Sideshow and The Quality of Mercy, argues in his slim study that the UN mission ‘conducted a brief, profound and very welcome social revolution’. The French professor Marie ...”

“... through the hospitals of Central America, New York City and Cairo – told in gruesome detail by William Shawcross – gave grim satisfaction to the mullahs who had already ordered his assassination. Not long after his departure, I had sat at the feet of the outrageous Ayatollah Khalkhali, the hanging judge of Iran, as he listed those of the Shah’s ...”

“... William Shawcross’s The Quality of Mercy is a fascinating, detailed and moving study of the famine that struck Cambodia – or Kampuchea as it is now called – five years ago, and of the response of the rest of the world to the disaster that followed. The book can be read at several levels: as a memorial to a society that no longer exists, as a footnote to the history of the wars in Indochina and their aftermath, as the story of a large international relief operation, and as a cautionary tale of how humanitarian motives can become subverted by local and global political forces ...”

“... This line of reasoning should, in logic, lead me to express admiration for the subject of William Shawcross’s enormous biography. For Rupert Murdoch is arguably the most successful, and certainly one of the most ruthlessly interfering, media moguls in the history of the world. Moreover, he shares Lord Beaverbrook’s colonial iconoclasm about ...”

“... Spitting Image to present her forty years later as a gin-swilling commoner. Since then death and William Shawcross have done little to humanise her. His biography was pious to a degree and, like his equally fulsome edition of her letters, much too long.* Despite all of which a personality, powerful and in some ways admirable and unusual, manages to ...”

“... new ones, sabotaging peace efforts and instigating lethal military adventures. Many years ago William Shawcross and Seymour Hersh revealed the extent of his hooliganism in Cambodia and elsewhere. More recently Patrick Seale showed in his biography of Asad that Kissinger almost single-handedly wrecked the chances of a Middle East settlement after ...”

“... naval officer striated with pride, it came to seem, if reports are true, like a life sentence. William Shawcross, in his expertly genuflecting biography of the queen mother, shows us a Duke of Edinburgh just after his wedding, a young man in love writing to his mother-in-law of the new unity he has just achieved and hopes will bless the ...”

“... look at it in the right way. How nice to dwell, for example, in the unclouded moral universe of Mr William Shawcross, who wrote a piece of effortless superiority, entitled ‘Shrugging off Genocide’, in the Times for 16 December. You would not collect, from Shawcross’s fulminations against Gott and the Guardian, the ...”

“... when I read the petition written by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and signed by Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, William Shawcross, Claude Lanzmann, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols, Neil Jordan, and, to bring up the female numbers, Diane von Furstenberg, the Isabelles Adjani and Huppert, Yamani Benguigui, Danièle Thompson and Arielle Dombasle. It reads: Apprehended like ...”

“... journalist, because I had only just got married, and I didn’t want to be parted from my husband, William Shawcross, who had been assigned to cover the war for the Sunday Times. In our room upstairs at the Hotel Royale, Saigon, I began looking at the New Testament, and was startled to find so few passages about the Mother of God. It seems naive of me ...”

“... a quarter of a century ago at the time of the Royal Commission on the Press chaired by Lord Shawcross (there has been another Royal Commission since). Its concern was less with content and editorial independence than with costs, efficiency and concentration of ownership. This was the first time the public became aware of over-manning in Fleet ...”

“... Murdoch, most of it at some deep level boring because it is so much on one side or the other. William Shawcross surprised and disappointed many of his admirers by coming out as a big Murdoch fan in his 1992 biography. Bruce Page’s recent work, The Murdoch Archipelago, is as badly written as any book I have ever read, and is full of sentences which ...”

“... In his Foreword to a new biography of Anthony Chenevix-Trench,* one-time headmaster of Eton, Sir William Gladstone writes that Trench’s ‘interest was in drawing out the best from boys as individuals’. Another interest, not mentioned by Sir William, lay in drawing down the underpants of boys – as individuals ...”

“... staff members as well – notably the columnist Conor Cruise O’Brien, the financial writer William Keegan, and, in all probability, the political editor Adam Raphael. If he hasn’t sacked them yet, it may only be because he finds himself strapped in by the conditions attached to the sale of the paper. But Rowland is a very determined character – as ...”

“... tributes that power has ever paid to reason’, and the British prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross, to say without blushing: ‘There are those who would perhaps say that these wretched men should have been dealt with summarily without trial . . . But that was not the view of the British government.’ There was and is little doubt about the guilt ...”