“... United the only person who dared to confront him over the issue was his captain, the fearless Roy Keane, who accused Ferguson of having betrayed the club for the sake of a horse during a furious slanging match in front of the rest of the players. Ferguson quickly decided it was time to let Keane go. For Ferguson the key to his own position within United ...”

“... they’re both immortal and funny. The overreach of the imagination and the containment of a strong intelligence are inseparable. And no doubt those polarities derive in part from her class and her history: the dryness and smartness from an upper-class style, the excess from a long tradition of Irish Protestant gothic, as well as from her own ...”

“... certainly characterised as traditional, if hardly sentimental and parochial. And there were strong complaints at the time about the advanced years of the short-listed candidates: the Sunday Times wondered why the judges could not have come up with ‘just one callow writer under 50’. But the physical description of Byatt is plain wrong. Her worst ...”

“... to participate on both sides of the debate. The cross-party Britain in Europe campaign was led by Roy Jenkins, then Labour home secretary, and supported by moderate consensus Tories such as Whitelaw and Maudling, the former Liberal leader Jo Grimond and middle-of-the-road Labour politicians like Cledwyn Hughes. On the other side of the argument were the ...”

“... them to analyse and illustrate the medieval antiquities of Normandy. She also observes that the strong organisational intelligence and meticulous observations of Thomas Rickman, whose Styles of Architecture in England from the Conquest to the Reformation, published in 1812, established terminology still in use today (Norman, Early English, Decorated and ...”

“... vacillations and hesitations (it is true that the non-interventionist camp was very strong in Congress, but it is also true that FDR was unwilling to pay even the smallest political price, or accept the slightest political risk, to force the pace of events). With or without Britain, the Americans and Russians would still have defeated the ...”

“... been fun if, say, George Brown had also kept a diary. But each of the existing versions has its strong points for future scholarship. Barbara Castle, a former newspaper reporter, has professional shorthand, so that her quotes can be relied on. Tony Benn has a Boswellian fetish about self-revealing candour, so that he provides many of the best anti-Benn ...”

“... of its detail, the book avoids the kind of micro-history now favoured by, for example, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, in which the relating of a single episode, garnished with a gloss of elementary social anthropology, is meant to proclaim self-evident significance. This is simply the imaginative re-creation of a momentous enterprise, set in the framework of an ...”

“... mairies and archives communales (the ‘photo of Pétain stacked in the attic’). Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie saluted him as ‘that indefatigable wanderer who has explored every one of our regions’. His influence was felt in person as well as in print. ‘To be taught by Richard Cobb, often in a class as small as an early Christian cenacle, was to be ...”

“... honking saxophones showcasing the vocalists, boogie-woogie and hybridised rhythms coupled with a strong backbeat by drummers who made free use of snares and rim-shots. Jerry Wexler, then of Billboard magazine and later of Atlantic Records, came up with the term ‘rhythm and blues’ in 1948, a vague catch-all for what had until then been called ‘race ...”

“... it must be. There was a second reason for hanging back from a phonetic solution, exceptionally strong in the case of the elaborate Egyptian and Mayan scripts, less so in that of the more functional-looking Linear B. So labour-intensive for the writer do hieroglyphs or Mayan glyphs appear to be, that a lifelong familiarity with our own relatively elementary ...”

“... brand of banality, with divisive effects on the art world. In 1960, independently at first, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol had begun to paint cartoons and advertisements drawn from tabloid newspapers of familiar characters and generic products – Popeye and Mickey, tennis shoes and golf balls. When Lichtenstein moved on to comic strips – romance ...”

“... government’ threatened by the Ulster Unionist-Conservative nexus, but behind it there was a strong Fenian influence. Patrick Pearse, not yet a member of the Brotherhood, made a famous speech in which he said that ‘it was a goodly thing to see arms in the hands of Irishmen’. Irish Unionists had finally ceased to depend on Westminster and by their ...”

“... of universities – not only in Oxford and Cambridge – in the Civil Service and in industry, a strong sense of succession which is linked to well-known academic establishments and to the manners and outlook they promote: it is tempered only by a desperate desire to show a broadmindedness which would exclude such influences. This is what excites the ...”

“... the Australian offshoot of the giant British conglomerate RTZ. Both men were at Oxford. Thus, as Roy Jenkins used to be the Conservative Party’s favourite Labour politician, so Hawke was the Australian Right’s favourite man of the Left – if he really was of the Left. His accession to power did not cause any capitalists to leap out of windows. The ...”