“... cars, houses, people and, naturally, drugs. To read Rieff on Miami is to recall with nostalgia John Berger’s The Seventh Man, with its haunting photographs by Jean Mohr of migrant Turkish or Italian workers in Switzerland, and its affecting notions about home and wandering. Rieff deals, not with a potentially Left force, but with violently right-wing ...”

“... friend Lewis Campbell saw him as ‘a country gentleman, or rather, to be more accurate, a North Country laird’. Maxwell lived in a rather less divided culture than that of C.P. Snow’s absurd caricature. In 1873, he suggested a joke question for the Cambridge mathematics examination, inviting candidates to interpret every vector ‘in literary ...”

“... noodles and foreign holidays. He recommends his travel agent, Philip Davies of Real Holidays, in North London. Presumably Mr Davies sent him East, because it was on the shores of an Oriental sea that Leadbeater had a blinding flash and realised that humans could develop joint stock companies and the iMac because they weren’t crustaceans. A chapter on ...”

“... Mr Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh.) And the realisation of what separation means, put forward by John Bowlby and others, ended the disastrous practice of keeping parents away from child patients in hospitals. In North London, more was being learned about children separated from their families. At Anna Freud’s Hampstead ...”

“... histories, Davies writes, ‘it is as if Anglo-Saxon England were bordered by an ocean to the north and the west as well as by a channel to the south. The mental planet that is peopled by Alfred and the Danes and Harold and the Conqueror has no place whatsoever for Hywell Dda, for Brian Boru, for Kenneth Mac Alpin or Macbeth.’ The culprits here were the ...”

“... one is in the room except a shy freshman. The funny man climbs a rickety ladder to the top of the north-east corner of the room. The books are shelved alphabetically by author; the As begin in that corner. He picks up the first book, reads a few pages, slams it shut, picks up the second … The other novelty contained in this book is the translation of a talk ...”

“... was time to pull down their cowshed and build a visitors’ centre. At the Vatican, however, Pope John Paul II disregarded a petition to complete Hildegard’s formal canonisation process (aborted in 1243) and declare her a doctor of the Church. Evidently, this most uppity of medieval women is not a model the Pope wants to raise up for emulation in the new ...”

“... included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by Stafford Cripps on his ...”

“... motorways which currently criss-cross pastoral England. One would have to go back to the days of John Buchan to find an English fictional hero capable of squeezing so much fun out of driving a car. Should Cullen blow the gaff on Lord Moggerhanger’s exploits? And could the British social fabric survive their exposure? Life goes on has a plot which hinges on ...”

“... Johnston, William McGrath, Carl Schorske, Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, Andrew Whiteside and John Boyer testify.* There are a number of plausible reasons for this. The first and most obvious is the great diaspora of Central European scholars brought about by the rise of Nazism in the 1930s – though some intellectuals, like Wittgenstein and ...”

“... Valeri was blackballed and had to be replaced by an angry Vatican with Mgr Roncalli (later John XXIII). In return Pius XII insisted that the French Catholic hierarchy remain unchallenged. This was clearly impossible: opinion polls showed that a better than eight-to-one majority wanted the collaborationist bishops punished. (Some of them had already had ...”

“... he will be away when his wife is seriously ill, in many ways he is a more significant figure in North than in South Britain, but he will go. Boswell had been powerfully drawn by London all his life. To be about to succumb to this pull, against all advice, marks him as unwise rather than selfish. By the standards created by the opportunities for selfishness ...”

“... and then, without bothering to consult the operational War Diaries, proceeds to spin out the John Connell-Correlli Barnett myth that Montgomery’s only contribution to the Desert arena was an incomprehensible uplift in morale. Monty’s plan for the defence of Alam Halfa, he declares, was inherited from Auchinleck: he neglects to mention that ...”

“... places on the difficulty of travel by bad roads between Solorgues and Langlade – about three km north of Solorgues – where the powerful Sestier resides. Le Roy Ladurie, in his explication de texte, compares Sestier in Langlade to the King who lives in the almost equally distant Paris, whence, as the dictons of the region tell us, ‘neither good wind nor ...”

“... way, but holding the balance scrupulously steady.’ For ‘English’, we may substitute ‘North Americans’, and for ‘Scots’, ‘Irish’. Likewise, if Mr Moore’s presentation of Mangan is, like Scott’s presentation of Waverley, ‘a strong portrait of a weak or weakish character’, the perceptive critic has brought out what the strength is ...”