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“... But what about countries where the civil service barely functions, where the rule of law is at best an aspiration and leaders deploy real weapons against their own people as well as metaphorical ones? The deliverologists would say it is even more important to have clear targets and a separate machinery for achieving them when the rest of the government is ...”

“... every respect to the people is deeply ingrained. Our culture is still one of subjecthood, at its best paternal and at its worst authoritarian.’ This hostility to the way the Left (as well as the Right) has conventionally run its and the country’s affairs is also to be found in the essays on economic and social policy. Christopher Huhne, in a ...”

“... of the same coin is struck in The Iraqi Revolution of 1958 by two of its American contributors: Nicholas Thacher, a diplomatic veteran who was in the American Embassy in Baghdad from 1956 to 58, and Frederick Axelgard, a current State Department official, both of whom consider that in the Fifties the United States displayed altogether too much deference for ...”

“... the century. In this connection it is particularly important to note that it independence was the best solution for Ireland, then it was of vital importance for two unconnected reasons that it be achieved in the first third of this century. The first reason – again ex post facto – is that if independence had not been achieved by, say, 1930, there simply ...”

“... he pragmatically calculates he’s in an impossible corner and they’ll kill him if he stays. As Nicholas Pileggi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scorsese, says in his hideously informative Wiseguy,* the documentary book on which the film is based: ‘He willingly turned on the world he knew and the men with whom he had been raised with the same ...”

“... the literary silence? Disco Biscuits is unlikely to make many converts. The writing is at its best when, as in Gavin Hills’s ‘White Burger Danny’, it restricts itself to a near-documentary account of parties and people. E culture’s variety is well represented, and Martin Millar’s squatland South London, Alex Garland’s backpacker ...”

“... the first page establishes the milieu. ‘Had tea with dear Lady Throckmorton whose nephew Nicholas Throckmorton, Robert’s heir, called.’ Midi Gascoigne and Timmie Buxton, her sister, get a mention, as do Emerald Cunard and Denis Rickett. Logan Pearsall Smith, aged 80, starts to tell a story of an American cousin of Henry James who ‘invited the ...”

“... this fearful symmetry. At one extreme it has triggered the tricksy pretension of the Terry Johnson-Nicholas Roeg film Insignificance; at the other, it inspired Norman Mailer’s ‘novel biography’ of a ‘possible’ Marilyn, which proved a triumph of intuitive speculation. Mailer leaned heavily on the first edition of Fred Lawrence Guiles’s ...”

“... dash and novelty, but little more analysis, in the treatment accorded P.D. James, Peter Lovesey, Nicholas Freeling, Simenon, Chandler and the husband-and-wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Only one of the essays seems really ambitious, and the effect, I’m afraid, is comic. Eric Mottram – an otherwise much respected old friend of mine – gets ...”

“... every arms company was involved in some kind of covert dealings.’ But, he adds in the best Monday Club tradition, ‘the overriding release had always been that I was very happy that we were making money.’ The boys in the big time were encouraging him to enlarge Astra, re-tool his already spanking plant at Faldingworth, Lincs, and join them on ...”

“... Brave New World so as to learn how things might work out if we did not read Brave New World. And Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea (a best-seller) was held up for massive ridicule: we asked if we could take this item home with us so that we might the more thoroughly acquaint ourselves with its gross failures of ...”

“... one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various factional groupings and dining clubs, such as Nick’s Diner, the Lollards and the Tory Reform Group.The term, however, remains a well-understood code in the party for a ...”

“... of 1998, in which Braudel turns his gaze back into antiquity, as well as to Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s meditation on the ‘connectivity’ afforded by the Mediterranean, The Corrupting Sea, which appeared in 2000. There is magic in Braudel’s writing and in his ability to cut through historical material to reveal the underlying structure of ...”

“... draws on extensive conversations with jewellers and miners, and he interviewed cooks about the best ways to prepare broths from animal fat or to curdle milk to produce different kinds of cheese. Noting that people get hungrier in cold places than in warm, he remarks with some hyperbole that ‘one Pole or German eats more in a single day than a Lombard or ...”

“... over the traces. (That happens in history.) Or does this make me a ‘conspiracy theorist’ too? Best, I think, to dump the phrase, certainly when it’s used as loosely as this. It doesn’t help. It may however be thought to help MI5. Restoring or boosting its reputation was the main reason this book was commissioned. Whatever the truth or otherwise of the ...”