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“... speech in 1956 denouncing Stalin’s crimes was a political act from which, as his biographer William Taubman put it, ‘the Soviet regime never fully recovered, and neither did he.’ Although it was plainly opportunistic, there was just as plainly more to it than that, a kind of reckless excess that cannot be accounted for in terms of political ...”

“... wiped his nose on his sleeve, but he was not going to be treated like this by God or man. Reading William Taubman’s tremendous biography, I see that this sort of thing kept happening to Khrushchev. Take the grand picnic for the Writers’ Union in May 1957, one of his many catastrophic meetings with the Moscow intellectuals, at which, after a ...”

“... astonishment, never forgave him for showing such ‘weakness’. Neither did his friends. It took William Taubman almost twenty years to complete his wonderful Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. This Gorbachev biography took a mere 11. And yet it is in some ways an even more heavyweight product. The research is vast; the tracking down of published and ...”

“... control, that its own actions and misperceptions played a vital role in shaping Soviet behaviour. William Taubman, one of the most astute recent students of Soviet foreign policy (and himself a critic of many revisionist assumptions), has presented a far more persuasive picture in his excellent book Stalin’s American Policy (1982), which Thomas cites ...”

“... Perhaps rather carefully, the words at the head of Graham Greene’s new novel are ascribed to William Shakespeare rather than to Hamlet, but inevitably it’s Hamlet they bring to mind. Very Hamlet, this complete scepticism – but not, surely, very Graham Greene; and what has it to do with a novel on the theme of Don Quixote? Turgenev brought Hamlet and ...”

“... as ‘Feb. 28, 1702: Today we were captured by pirates.’ Some absurdities are probably from William Beckford rather than Barrie: ‘The two youths then stepped on board, the one with his gold-braided coat open at the waist to show his slender brown chest and stomach, a brace of pistols inlaid with silver, and a cutlass at his belt. He was a striking ...”

“... William Golding’s working material, the stuff he lights upon and makes his novels out of – and which he regularly proceeds to subvert or transform to his purpose, introducing levels of meaning unsuspected in the raw stuff – never ceases to retain its importance for these novels. Coral Island, we all know, provided the working material for Lord of the Flies; and if Mr Golding’s purpose was to subvert a favourite myth about English boyhood, he nevertheless chose a worthy myth – one we can still half assent to while half persuaded by the black, reductive alternative ...”

“... of the planet’s history. And something in common, too, with the myth-making in Rousseau or William Morris that offers visions of hope or disaster for mankind. The myth-making here seems, by comparison, unpersuasive – being vague on the lost values of the past (‘voluntary submission to the great Whole’) and both vague and cranky on the continuing ...”

“... the appropriation of Auschwitz (including Höss himself) by a thick, mainstream American novel, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice: this actually has some reality about it, because it’s pretty sure in its own conventions, corny as these are. Sophie is a dazzlingly beautiful survivor of Auschwitz, and while the pathos of her past is revealed in extended ...”

“... CVs (typically quite selective) onto the narrative in a clumsy appendix. The contrast with William Taubman’s biography of Khrushchev – to take an obvious parallel – is painful.1 Taubman started out much more explicitly than Vogel with the intention of studying his subject from the angle of his relations ...”

“... of de Pury’s friends, such as Tita Thyssen-Bornemisza (wearing a ‘100+ carat diamond’), Al Taubman and Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. De Pury was private curator to Baron ‘Heini’ – Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza – then chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, then established Phillips de Pury, which he hoped would ‘turn the auction house ...”