“... sense of loss. For her the ancien régime never quite lost its glamour; she dearly loved a lord and her literary heroes were the Great Victorians. The power of the past, as childhood or simply nostalgia, was a recurring theme in her work, at odds with the modernity of her material; just as her sensitivity to women and her obsessive interest in female ...”

“... on that (b) Gov. St Thomas’s Hospital; (c) Parliamentary candidate for distant seat; (d) stately-home-owner; (e) car-dealer; (f) fighting single-handed battles with Council, developing property etc. And yet if I was your (c) and (d), with just a little of (e) thrown in, there would be nothing creative going back; nothing in value for all that God has given ...”

“... Telegraph-readers who would not be out of place in Chiswick or Cheltenham. But they are also home to many, white and black, who have, in their time, been involved in a lot of bloodshed. Now, with Harare, like the rest of the country, crumbling before your eyes, some of these men are willing to say what they know. It’s part of the general atmosphere of ...”

“... century into a so-called underclass which is often the subject of baffled despair today both at home and abroad.’ The first stage in Mount’s argument is to trace how ‘the masses’ were invented, or reified, as a consequence of the industrial revolution. Early modern England had a complex, highly stratified social structure. Mount quotes a 1688 ...”

“... state of affairs? Are there not important differences between the qualitative inequalities of the lord and his serfs and the quantitative inequalities of a professional and a working class? Has not the generalisation of citizenship made a difference? And has not Fred Hirsch – not mentioned a single time in this book on inequality! – made points about the ...”

“... Presidents of Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia met in an emergency summit to discuss Sir Alec Douglas Home’s announcement in July 1970 that Britain would sell arms to South Africa. Mr Smith was invited to join the Presidents’ meeting and he brings out well the unbridgeable chasm of mistrust which opened between Britain and Obote and Nyerere. Unlike most ...”

“... says, is almost always shorter than bad, and the short is also more memorable, as exemplified by Lord Bacon’s comment on an ambitious political rival: ‘He doth like the ape, that the higher he climbs the more he shows his arse.’ For models Medawar suggests various philosophers and essayists who wrote or still write brilliant prose – but a young man ...”

“... in London during a shopping spree a few days earlier – suggesting that they expected to go home at the end of it. They were not fanatics, but ‘idiots’ who had been ‘sent here to die’. Towfiq Ibrahim al-Rashidi, their leader, came from a well-off family in the shipping business in Khorramshahr, an Iranian port across the Shatt al-Arab waterway ...”

“... Bazargan’s interim government distanced themselves from the students or called on them to go home. The only powerful supporter of the occupation was Khomeini. Through his son, he told the students: ‘You are in the right place. Stay put.’ He gave a fiery speech in support of them. The students then found themselves at the centre of a global ...”

“... DOING? That’s a fun question to ask now. A ringing in the ears, even outside the ears. Oh Lord, I should have known it – we were talking about the Hum. Everything you’d read about in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, the X-Files would eventually cover. Was that show bad for us? For our minds? Maybe nine straight years of FEMA LIES ABOUT THE ...”

“... man under his vine: ‘Tonight they will surely come. Armour the leaves, Lock up the tree, Call home the dead and be prepared.’ And Carmi comments: ‘The introduction of the anachronistic telephone into the body of a famous biblical idiom for peace and peace of mind – “They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree and none shall ...”

“... between social standing and technical skill, the gentlemen and the tarpaulins, in which even Lord Howard could lay a gun, and spoke freely and by name to his ‘poor toiling and continual labouring mariner[s]’; while Drake, in a famous scene which Rodger does his best to run down, not only said, ‘I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the ...”

“... feel young again, so D.H. Lawrence is said to have said (although in making Osbert the model for Lord Chatterley, Lawrence may have been seeking to modify his celebration). In the social climate of the late Thirties, it was convenient to forget them, but they had done some things that were worth remembering. Thus, with the Reynolds News affair, the wish to ...”

“... plots both of Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh present, in their contrived and melodramatic ways, a deep home truth: that there is nothing demeaning in a woman’s dependence if it involves the equal dependence of her man. When her sister Henrietta finally managed to marry her soldier lover Surtees Cook, in the teeth of their father’s antagonism, Elizabeth Barrett ...”

“... the ANC or Polisario – two groups who have made considerable diplomatic gains – merely drove home the ‘forgotten’ character of the Eritrean conflict. After a few moments, a decisive silence would take hold, followed by a peremptory change of subject or a general dispersal. Over the land itself, a similar vexed silence seems to preside. During periods ...”