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“... minds of that third-rate decade, the Sixties’ – betrayed a shaky grasp of cultural history. (Michael Foot’s description of Tebbit as ‘a semi-house-trained polecat’ may have revealed an equally shaky grasp of natural history, yet still seemed nearer the mark.) There was no pleasing either side in that divided decade: Arthur Scargill was as hostile ...”

“... untrammelled by international institutions. Trumpeting Bush’s pre-emptive assault on Iraq, Michael Ignatieff recommended in 2003 a new American empire whose ‘grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known’. The United States, Power asserted as Obama’s nominee for US ...”

“... journal Our Time, and Geoffrey Matthews, later a Shelley scholar. When they tried to join the Young Communist League their letters were intercepted and the police summoned to interview them in the head’s study. The Thompsons’ neighbours in Boars Hill, the Carritts, had seven children and when one of the daughters died, the five brothers and their ...”

“... that it succeeded at Lenin’s expense, a triumphant negation of Lenin’s success. Back in 1984, Michael Scammell wrote a fine warts-and-all biography of Solzhenitsyn which was forced to end on a note of uncertainty. Had Solzhenitsyn blown his great international success of the 1970s by retreating into angry exile in Vermont to write a multi-volume epic of ...”

“... Rioja of vanilla and muscat (uniquely) of grapes. Beyond that, it seems to be a lottery. The young Samuel Pepys tried mightily to be accounted a connoisseur, but all he could find to say of the Château Haut-Brion that so tickled his fancy was that it ‘hath a good and most particular taste which I never before encountered’. My feinschmecking wife ...”

“... specialising in industrial sculpture (the next Richard Serra, even), started to make it his home. Young Jared took pleasure in the neighbourhood, dirty and dangerous as it was, with homeless people and intravenous drug users camping out in Tompkins Square Park, and was surprised when a contingent of protesters trying to storm the Christodora during the riots ...”

“... I feel at least, that he [Sainte-Beuve] is a man of the past, of a dead generation; and that we young Americans are (without cant) men of the future… We are Americans born – il faut en prendre son parti. I look upon it as a great blessing; and I think that to be an American is an excellent preparation for culture. Five years later, he wrote to Charles ...”

“... own mother had taken food to her Menshevik sisters in a Tsarist jail), many young Jews were traumatised by the fact that the pogroms had begun again – in Germany of all places – and saw the CP as the natural leader of the anti-Fascist struggle. Inside the CP Rowley mingled with figures such as Hilda Bernstein (‘the best speaker we ...”

“... municipal scallywags like Derek Hatton. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll are all very well for the young, but the real pleasure of middle age is schadenfreude. Sometimes, when one looks back at the long line of Thatcher’s villains, one has to concede that, however much one disliked Thatcher’s triumphalism at the time, one could hardly wish the battle to ...”

“... would conflate the industrial grime of Stockport with the sea breezes of genteel Southport, where young Alan was actually brought up. Grandfather Taylor had made his money in the cotton trade – he claimed to be a millionaire – and Alan’s father Percy worked in the family business, lighting his first havana as he was borne daily by train to his office in ...”

“... thousand articles. Williams was, indeed, a quite compulsive writer, almost a chronic writer. As a young working-class scholarship boy up at Cambridge, he seems to have decided, like not a few Welshmen before and after him, that the way to storm this alien citadel was to overwhelm it with a tide of wordy socialism. As an undergraduate Communist, he wrote his ...”

“... in great houses ... and his assumption into a kind of artistic establishment in England.’ The young Yeats had known John O’Leary, who despite his long political exile remained a representative of ‘a free-thinking Catholic intelligentsia’ capable of dialogue with those ‘few educated men’ of the Protestant Ascendancy. But the decline of Ascendancy ...”

“... the fascinating and secretive British-American Project for a Successor Generation, which instructs young and friendly natives, who look likely to climb the provincial ladder of power, on the advantages of following the American way. Do you begin to see the outline of a political class? A bickering and faintly risible élite, whose ranks are filled with old ...”

“... had ceased for ever. In the days before Hollywood sequels Jane Austen enthralled her young relations by telling them what every reader wants to know: what happens after the book’s last page, or play’s last scene? It’s unusual to have so close a glimpse of the offstage author spinning consequences (and since Austen was only entertaining her ...”

“... appreciation of the art of our time than Picasso the Charlatan. But the curious fact is that when Michael Ayrton in the Fifties or John Berger in the Sixties tried to react to the generally unctuous tone of what passed for Picasso criticism, they produced essays which rebounded more on themselves than on Picasso, though these are among the finest writers on ...”