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“... fears of demographic decline and corruption, ‘psychoanalysis and social dismay’, the fear of war – mainly through the writings, public and private, of those whom Delumeau, who did the same for his period, called people ‘who had the word and the power’: in his day Catholic clerics, in Overy’s a selection of bourgeois intellectuals and reflective ...”

“... condescension. The image of ‘our own people’ – a Conservative proxy for the rhetoric of the class war – remained fixed. The fact is that young Margaret Roberts left the real Grantham a very long time ago: a place at Somerville College, Oxford, was the means of making good her escape in 1943. Oxford opened many doors; what kept them open was her ...”

“... country to remain at peace, and to play down the seriousness of the issues when there was internal war. The only civil war to be popularly recognised as important is that between 1642 and 1646, a relatively unbloody outbreak, and much of the general interest in it is absorbed in re-staging its battles in fancy dress: much ...”

“... One track of the story is the comedy of Colin’s adventures with a sharply-observed set of upper-class twits and the upper-class bitch he hopelessly pines for. Another track – more interesting to Scruton watchers – is the drama of Colin’s ideological conversion. Love and the irresistible magnetism of English ...”

“... they came from Paris’s posher areas. They were not the progeny of the gilets jaunes or working-class Le Pen voters in the dying mill towns of northern France. Many of them would have received their political baptism in La Manif pour tous, which led the opposition to gay marriage legislation in 2013, taking the entire political ...”

“... International Military Tribunal convened at Nuremberg shortly after the end of the Second World War, one of the many objects of its attention were the Storm Divisions (Sturm-Abteilungen, SA) of the Nazi movement. The SA, the prosecution alleged, had been a criminal organisation involved in war crimes and crimes against ...”

“... with a note underneath. Edward Thompson had been completing The Making of the English Working-Class. He lived in Halifax, and needed a final couple of weeks in the British Museum. In those days I lived in Talbot Road, newly wed to Juliet Mitchell. She was teaching in Leeds, while I was working for New Left Review in London. After hours Edward and I would ...”

“... it for myself when I was the literary editor of the Evening Standard. It was during the Gulf War and my editor, John Leese, said that it would not be appropriate to hold one of the regular literary lunches, meant to be a celebratory occasion, on a morning when – for all we could predict – horrible news of slaughter might be coming in from the ...”

“... devoted to him, a sort of glorified guide to the exhibition by Hermione Hobhouse, and a first-class biography by Robert Rhodes James.* Albert took a long time to receive his deserts. Indeed I doubt whether he was fully appreciated during his lifetime. He was a foreigner. He disliked the rigmarole of court life and he was altogether too clever. The Great ...”

“... Dyhouse’s book is concerned only with girls, and mainly with those drawn from middle or upper-class circles, although she makes one substantial digression in which she contrasts their educational history with that of their working-class contemporaries in the elementary schools of the day. Stephen Humphries’s story, on ...”

“... sets of reasons for believing that there was no choice but to fight an opponent who had declared war. Geoffrey Goodman makes the first case: Margaret Thatcher saw the NUM – Arthur Scargill in particular – as the embodiment of all that she held to be endemic in Britain’s economic decline: monopoly trade-unionism in a state industry subsidised well ...”

“... soldiers in Spain, and then turned those hard adventures into fables of imperialism, poverty and war. Everything that he wrote has the feel of direct experience, as though the books composed one long autobiography: yet everything is transformed, moulded into meaning, by his fierce moral sense. It’s no wonder that myths grew up about him, or that they still ...”

“... worked almost to death through a succession of illnesses; he lost a lung and seven ribs. After the war he became a film extra, playing a starved-looking prisoner in The Colditz Story, and ended up as Clark Gable’s butler in Hollywood. Macintyre says he got the idea for his book from reading Chapman’s obituary (he died, aged 83, in 1997), but he might just ...”

“... of old movies where pukka chaps had stiff upper lips and stiff moustaches, the whole upper class apparatus from top hats to gardenias in the buttonhole, will remember his father, the actor and playwright Hugh Williams, whom he writes about so affectingly. The actor first flared in Hollywood in the Thirties, disappeared into the Army for the duration of ...”