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“... which cracked the Zimmerman telegram, and much besides. FDR left awestruck, but by the end of the war he had created a US intelligence network that stretched right round the world. Also on that trip he met his Naval opposite number, Churchill, whom he heartily disliked (‘He acted like a stinker, lording it all over us’); but, to his great chagrin, he was ...”

“... celebrity like Heidegger, Russell, Sartre or Wittgenstein. But for a period after the Second World War, he was the leading figure of the school of ordinary language philosophy that dominated Oxford, achieved substantial influence in the wider Anglophone world and left its stamp for a much longer time on the way analytic philosophers work, think and ...”

“... by granting the Dutch rabbi an annual pension of £100. After the outbreak of an Anglo-Spanish war in 1654, a Jewish merchant resident in London had his property confiscated as a Spaniard: he complained to Cromwell that he was not Spanish but Jewish. The lawyers of the Admiralty Court duly handed the property back without fuss: their action implied without ...”

“... purified and liberalised itself by reducing expenditure, abolishing most of its patronage and its class bias, and extending the franchise. The monarchy went along with this process of reform, stepping back from day to day political involvement (often rather grudgingly), and reducing its expenses (even more grudgingly). It now occupies an almost entirely ...”

“... up in a grand house on the edge of a Wiltshire village, the younger son in a family whose upper-class existence was funded by the profits from Welsh coal mines. His early (and lasting) passions were hunting, fishing and shooting, but he also harboured literary ambitions. Arriving at Cambridge in 1899, he split his time between the rich sporting set and the ...”

“... George Bush brushed away a tear as he described how he had wept while deciding to unleash the air war in the Gulf last January. ‘Like a lot of people, I’ve worried a little bit about shedding tears in public or the emotion of it,’ he told a convention of Southern Baptists in June, but ‘as Barbara and I prayed at Camp David before the air ...”

“... time she spent in a Spanish mental hospital after a breakdown at the beginning of the Second World War – seems to show the reason. While other Surrealists played at madness, she was intimate with it. Their stories are fancy dress by comparison. Surrealism offered a way of describing the terror of irrationality – ‘The House of Fear’ is a justification ...”

“... are broken. Narcissus-like, they stood for an instant amazedly aware of their own beauty; the war, which the old men made, has left them tired and embittered. What will the young men of 1922 be?’ I suppose such stuff might indicate a rising journalist; the answer to the question certainly does; we learn that the new generation ‘will be, above all ...”

“... farmers anywhere to make much more than a minor contribution. There have been some (mainly middle-class) marketing successes, such as organic food (most of which is imported), but most financial high points for British farmers have been the result of subsidies, tariff barriers, U-boats – and productivity gains as a result of technology. Lawrence gives a ...”

“... villages. The PKK, founded by the student leader Abdullah Öcalan in 1978, began a guerrilla war in 1984, claiming the Kurds’ right to self-determination within (this was always stressed) the framework of a democratised and demilitarised Turkish state. By ‘democratisation’ Kurds mean the repeal of laws used to harass minorities or to deny them ...”

“... he backs off furiously. Hester Prynne, Clarissa, Tess, Anna Karenina – life is indifferent to class when it comes to trapping us in stories. Still, as Tess complains to her mother, ‘ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.’ The poor have no choice but to end up in novels because they do not read ...”

“... and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and justified the hideous war in Vietnam. Cold War liberals themselves, with the kept conservative journalist Joseph Alsop they formed a Three of Hearts in the less fastidious quarters of Washington DC. Another player made up an occasional fourth ...”

“... forerunner of Guevara.By the standards of the time, Guevara had a fairly conventional upper-middle-class upbringing. His childhood, like his short adult life, was dominated by his asthma. His parents were obliged to move, largely for his sake, from the semi-tropical lowlands of Misiones to Alta Gracia, on the lower slopes of the Andes above Córdoba. Guevara ...”

“... percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long ...”

“... and the piano, two Trojan horses that brought the arts into the hitherto philistine middle-class European home. Johnson’s anecdotes and even his jokes conform to journalistic propriety. They aren’t there just for colour or to display the community’s diversity, but are targeted as in a newspaper on the private lives and hidden weaknesses of public ...”