“... of great cities’ which it brought with it, and with the seemingly inexorable rise of working-class consciousness and middle-class democracy, 19th-century historians tend to dismiss rural England in (at worst) a few curt phrases, or (at best) in one obligatory chapter on ‘agriculture’ or ‘the land’. But, as ...”

“... Paul as a child – hardly holy, but something regarded as a harmless sport among middle and upper-class males, so I’m given to understand – and he seems also to have referred to him, always, as ‘the Powlie’, which must have been annoying for the young fellow, at the very least. But then Betjeman always enjoyed name-calling and was a great one for the ...”

“... the 14th century, but which became prominent in the 19th, before fading away after the First World War. It was used mainly by wealthy families intent on demonstrating that one of their members was incapable of managing his affairs. Women, too, were sometimes subjected to commissions in lunacy, but less often, since married women were not held to have property ...”

“... him 1.5 pfennigs for every kilo of ammonia produced using his process. In the last year of the war, the factories in Oppau and Leuna produced 115,000 tons, and Haber’s royalty payments were worth the present-day equivalent of about $4 million. Haber won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918; Bosch became chairman of BASF, which made huge amounts of money ...”

“... Few people now remember that for many months after the First World War ended in November 1918 the blockade of Germany, where the population was already on the edge of starvation, was maintained with full rigour. By the following spring, the German authorities were projecting a 50 per cent increase in the infant mortality rate ...”

“... the world when the Third Reich was new? Before September 1939 and even after the Second World War began, the West was full of enablers and apologists. Hitler’s American admirers included Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst and Charles Lindbergh. General Motors, DuPont and IBM did business with the Nazis. So did MGM. It’s no shock to see democratic ...”

“... took arms against Britain in 1775 resignedly. He was 43, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War and a participant in the Atlantic economy. He had made his name (and his fortune) in the early 1750s, inheriting a plantation from his half-brother Lawrence and leading military expeditions intended to prise the Ohio Country from the French and their Native ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”