“... the efforts of kindly Tommies in winning hearts and minds. Recent studies – for instance, David French’s excellent The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945-67 – show that in Malaya, Cyprus, Aden and Kenya British soldiers in fact displayed frequent brutality, often condoned by their officers. In all of Britain’s counterinsurgency ...”

“... life must be municipalised, will not fail to demand that this great necessity of joy, or … the means of joy, be also supplied by their local councils.’ In 1930, an MP observed that a young person today lives in a municipal house, and he washes himself … in municipal water. He rides on a municipal tram or omnibus, and I have no doubt that before long ...”

“... of Karl Marx and Jesus Christ, with quite a bit of Tolstoy and Gandhi thrown in. Not using money means that they pick up food from bins: they have regular haunts, up and down the country, and they visit them when travelling around to give out leaflets. ‘We feel joy at all this free food,’ Alf said. ‘And you also feel disgusted to see all this rubbish ...”

“... England – never again could the Scots deceive themselves that the English lacked the will or the means to conquer them.’ No really equal confederation of states was possible. Recent subjection had only emphasised a fundamental and inescapable imbalance. Today England represents about 85 per cent of the United Kingdom’s population, Scotland about 9 per ...”

“... characterised by the more or less dominating role which the ‘concept’ plays in it. It is by no means necessary that a concept must be connected with a sensorially cognisable and reproducible sign (word); but when this is the case, thinking becomes by means of that fact communicable.So, for Einstein, the attempt to grasp ...”

“... one of the indestructible balls made by elves in The Lord of the Rings: in Tolkien’s Elvish it means ‘one that sees from afar’. The company was founded on a simple premise: governments and public agencies hold a lot of information, but it is siloed and poorly organised. If properly collated and arranged, the data could be employed to enormously ...”

“... portrait, albeit of a distinctively colonial character and quality. Last year, the art historian David Bindman, who has studied the picture closely for thirty years, proposed that it is in fact a self-portrait, painted by Williams himself.What is the intent of the image and what is created by its beholders? The problem of Francis Williams’s portrait shows ...”

“... else is bilge’ (the German quark, which has since made its way into English, literally means ‘soft white cheese’). But whatever the conditions in which she found herself – in Warsaw, she was one of 14 political prisoners crammed into a single cell – she never lost her fervour: her joy, as she put it, amid the horrors of the world. ‘My ...”

“... Before it was a classic film, Gone with the Wind was a classic PR stunt. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible ...”

“... which is where you’ll be shopping if you decide to follow your dream of becoming the next David Foster Wallace – who did have to work, incidentally, like the rest of us. (At Pomona College, Foster Wallace’s ‘Prose Fiction’ class consisted entirely of getting students to read mass-market bestsellers.) Why are there no great novelists any ...”

“... suggest that events in Korea in late 1950 brought the US to the brink of nuclear war. Whatever he means when he writes that ‘the knife-edge that Truman had been walking suddenly terminated above an abyss,’ the fact is that the American nuclear arsenal remained in the US under lock and key. Still, Truman was in a fix. He had initially characterised Korea ...”

“... of sugary mango chutney and what we called naan bread (not realising it was a tautology since naan means ‘bread’). For a treat our family would go to Uddin’s Manzil Tandoori Restaurant on Walton Street in Oxford (long since closed down), where my sister and I would share a mushroom biryani which came with a mixed vegetable curry in a delicious oily red ...”

“... wonders why ordinary men and women generally obey their rulers. It was a problem that perplexed David Hume as well. ‘Nothing is more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye,’ Hume wrote in 1758, ‘than to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few ... When we enquire by what ...”

“... read the Lesson. But this old man is fully their match. He refuses to apply to them even though it means cutting himself off from his beloved church. I could have come here then, you think, and just seen an old man praying, seen a priest visit him on Sundays, and never realised that this still rural silence, the old man’s very immobility, those odd priestly ...”

“... that dispose one somewhat more against Tennant. Philip Hoare relates one, as told by the Hon. David Herbert, about his treatment of the actress Margaret Rutherford. He cultivated her assiduously – even, more or less, proposing marriage to her – and she fell for his charms, and then when one day she came to his house for the weekend, he quite shattered ...”