“... different world, though. Niall has arrived at Trinity still simmeringly obsessed with Ian, a schoolmate who may, he worries, have finally cottoned on to the nature of his jealousy. One day he catches the eye of a man who looks a little like Ian, a man he has seen before. He follows him, struggling to keep up ...”

“... hard to avoid the term ‘takeover’ – has been a phenomenon of the Seventies and Eighties in Britain. It has been one of the many changes to have occurred in a society which may be said to have been stunned by change. And perhaps this is why the attitude of the white majority to Asian shopkeepers is hard to gauge. On the whole, and at a guess, it appears ...”

“... House of Lords, the highest court in both countries, decided, as it had to, that the law of Great Britain was laid down by the statute of 1710. The unlawfulness of perpetual copyright was confirmed, and all injunctions were dissolved. Thus from then until 1808, when copyright was extended from 14 to 28 years, what St Clair calls a ‘brief copyright ...”

“... Britain produces an extraordinary amount of commentary, in print, on television and on radio; so much that the production of opinion can seem to be our dominant industry, the thing we are best at and most take to. For the most part, it isn’t bad commentary. If the broadsheets were badly written, if the sermonisers and pundits couldn’t speak in coherent sentences, if you routinely turned the radio on to hear people not making any sense, it would all be much easier to dismiss ...”

“... into those historians who they believe have made unwarranted assumptions about the links between Britain and South Africa: to wit, that Britain fought the Boer War to get its hands on the gold and that economic considerations remained the motivating force in its difficult relationship with South Africa thereafter. Early ...”

“... The souvenir volume that stands in for a catalogue for the Dulwich exhibition has a note by Ian A.C. Dejardin, director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery.* It begins with a quotation – ‘Rockwell is terrific. It’s become too tedious to pretend he isn’t’ – and goes on: ‘So famously wrote the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl in Art ...”

“... in his memoir, Prince Charming. ‘There was a feeling of confidence in the air. What happened to Britain in the renowned 1960s – for me the period between 1956 and 1970 – came from this act of national will: the creation of the welfare state.’ ‘To My Fellow Artists’ (1958) Wand and Quadrant, Logue’s first collection of poetry, had been ...”

“... down on all but a few days’. Belfast’s council used to be a bastion of Unionism. When Ian Paisley led a campaign to wreck the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 the council hung a vast banner reading ‘Ulster Says No’ across the front of the City Hall. The Union flag was flown in front of its great wedding-cake dome 365 days a ...”

“... resorting to Postmodern wankology, this design seemed absolutely perfect for the Thatcherite Britain of the time, and becoming familiar with the style at an impressionable age seemed, in some non-specific way, to raise one’s standards.Every generation, of course, has its invigorating progenitors of taste, its moment-capturing image-makers: Aubrey ...”

“... that some hawk in the Pentagon would persuade the old boy that a nuclear war could be won. In Britain the leading defence intellectuals, including Michael Howard, Lawrence Freedman, and John Erickson, continued to press the case for deterrence, détente and multilateral disarmament. Whether they played any part in steering the world away from a ...”

“... won the near unanimous endorsement of nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was rejected by Ian Paisley’s hardline Democratic Unionist Party and divided Trimble’s Ulster Unionists; two of the future leaders of the DUP, Arlene Foster and Jeffrey Donaldson, were defectors from the UUP. In 2007, an elderly, faltering Paisley – his thrawnness cracking ...”

“... was to be assembled for the invasion of Japan, with smaller but still significant contingents from Britain, Australia and the rest of the Commonwealth. Despite an unprecedented advance bombardment from sea and air, which would have annihilated the Imperial Navy and Air Force, and despite the help the Red Army could provide by driving simultaneously south to ...”

“... art-house singer with rivals Blur, chips in: ‘I want Labour to get in. I’d like to think that Britain in the 21st century will care about better health care, and care about its education.’ A group of people near us at the bar, celebrating another Chelsea win, remember the late Matthew Harding, impresario at Stamford Bridge, whose timely £1 million for ...”

“... in chemical manufacture.Scottish​ emigration to North America began on a large scale after Britain defeated France in the Seven Years’ War in 1763 and in its victory acquired many thousands of acres that could be sold or leased to British migrants. Of the roughly one hundred thousand Scots who left for North America between then and 1815, most went ...”

“... when there were plenty of people to stand by their woman. Those who wrote about her included Ian Gilmour, W.G. Runciman, Neal Ascherson, Christopher Hitchens, R.W. Johnson, Ross McKibbin, E.P. Thompson, Tam Dalyell and Peter Clarke. What they wrote seemed excellent to me, with Runciman bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a ...”