“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the issue of Burke’s Irishness needs problematising. As with those real-life Phineas Finns whom Roy Foster discusses in his essay ‘Marginal Men and Micks on the Make’, it is possible to argue that what was remarkable about Burke was less his angry devotion to Ireland, or the discrimination he suffered on account of this, than the degree to which he ...”

“... kind of poetry the editors of A Various Art have in mind when they deprecate (if that’s not too strong a word) ‘an attitude’ prevalent in the Sixties which persists today? Current constructions of British poetry, to our amusement though not to our chagrin, persevere with the stylistic remnants of that attitude. The poetry generally on offer is either ...”

“... joy at the news of her pregnancy. A more interesting account of this relationship will be found in Roy MacGregor-Hastie’s gossipy book, which uses information from his friend the Dadaist Tristan Tzara.* He notes, as Huffington doesn’t, that Marie-Thérèse was religious as well as sportive and sexy. Dora Maar succeeded Marie-Thérèse Walter as Picasso’s ...”

“... and Rosewall, 18-year-old prodigies in the Fifties, but also Neale Fraser, Mal Anderson, Laver, Roy Emerson, John Newcombe and Fred Stolle (plus lesser stars like Don Candy and Bob Howe). I wanted to know more about South African tennis during apartheid, which gave rise to Sturgess, Gordon and Jean (his sister) Forbes, plus the colourful Abe Segal, and fine ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”