“... Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A.P. Herbert recorded that. And it was ...”

“... a couple of pamphlets back in the Forties, when he was shaping to be World War Two’s Wilfred Owen, keeping a seat on the board, and grandstanding as the ‘advertised star of the evening’ at a pub show, ‘off the Waterloo Road’. Derek Raymond, like P.D. James, is fascinated by poetry. He’s the leading light of another Establishment, the official ...”

“... war, Gurney’s is the war of the private infantryman, as against the subalterns’ war of Owen or Grenfell, Sassoon or Blunden or Graves. Because he is not of the officer class, he feels no responsibility for the horror, hence no guilt about it, and so his revulsion from it is manageable. He is nearer to ...”

“... knocks are almost a proof of intelligence and valour in us.’ How unimaginable that Wilfred Owen should have written such a thing from the trenches, but then he was pushed into being a poet by circumstances. Like Baudelaire, Berryman and Lowell had to make their circumstances: otherwise they would have decayed like their parents and their ...”

“... a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of ...”

“... does it work for you? To defend religion’s success is not to defend it. It is to undermine it. David Hume knew this. In The Natural History of Religion, he attacked religion in exactly the way Johnson defends it – as a therapy offering consolation. He secularises religion and demonises secularism, and in doing so, makes Christianity vulnerable where it ...”

“... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”

“... end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and David Sheppard. In 1949, such was the craze for sport, 90,000 people turned up to watch the FA Amateur Cup Final. As Anthony Bailey, who watched Portsmouth when they won the League Championship two years running, fondly remembers, ‘football shorts were long and ...”

“... they are still very much of the common people. Stagecoach was the director’s own project. David Selznick wouldn’t take it on as producer because he saw it as ‘just another Western’ with no big stars, and Walter Wanger, the eventual producer, would have wanted Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in the leads. But Ford insisted on Claire Trevor and ...”

“... W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill (Arthur Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling sent messages of support). At first glance, this may seem to be the literary and intellectual establishment in its pomp. Reference works and biographies make it ...”

“... Protestant people, to use their weapons if Britain tried to force constitutional change on them. David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, now hailed in many quarters as a ‘moderate’, was himself a supporter of Vanguard, the militant Unionist body which in the early Seventies had links with Loyalist paramilitaries. After the abolition of the ...”

“... committed suicide), but the only MP who was found taking money from the Eastern bloc was Will Owen. (This is quite surprising: so many MPs are on the take from one interest or another that one would have thought even a random sort-through might have thrown up half a dozen.) There was anxiety about the contacts of some of Wilson’s personal friends ...”

“... a groan when we get to the postmortem phase with a paragraph that begins: ‘The classicist David Grene, Bellow’s colleague at the Committee on Social Thought (an interdisciplinary PhD programme at the University of Chicago, also a sort of high-powered academic salon des refusés), drew an intriguing parallel between Greek comedy and The Last ...”

“... raced to meet the expectations of their followers. (Unlike most governments, as the historian David Renton points out, the fascist parties in Italy and Germany became more radical once in office.) Fascism involves a form of collective behaviour that seems unaccountable. Many in the interwar period were slow to recognise the danger it posed, seeing fascism ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”