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“... arrested and thrown off the ship at Aden. He would die soon afterwards in an ambush at the North-West Frontier.So, a nicely damaging early life for Barbara, setting her up for a wrecked adulthood. ‘The roster of [her] boyfriends in the early part of the war … runs comfortably into double figures,’ Taylor tells us. One of those boyfriends was the ...”

“... proposition for the Conservatives, if hard to implement. In the 1950s, the Tory prime ministers Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan championed home ownership, and politicians and financiers became keener on the idea of enabling the working class to own shares. The Wider Share Ownership Council, founded in 1958, promoted schemes such as employee share ...”

“... categories which too often close enquiry before it has commenced. Some in the West are prisoners of vast undiscriminating categories ... and bring those ready-made slide-rules to measure, and often to obliterate, the complexities of the past.’ That could stand as motto for all three works. Beyond the Frontier is hacked from the same hard ...”

“... folk view still extant and not limited to the Mediterranean, must be borne in mind when sex in the West is under discussion. In the West, it is safe to say, neither the practice nor the ideology – even the male ideology – of sex has ever been singular, except in the sense of being remarkable. In Sexual Desire, Roger ...”

“... This had its good side. In its judgment on the racist behaviour of the South Africans in South-West Africa, the PMC laid it down that ‘first in importance come the interests of the natives, secondly the interest of the whites. The interest of the whites should only be considered in relation to the direct or indirect exercise of protection over the ...”

“... it stands, would you believe it, for flawed character. It is with some relief that one turns to Anthony Glees’s Secrets of the Service. Glees is a professional historian and rightly attempts to place British intelligence operations in the context of the twists and turns of British foreign policy. In so far as it is possible, Glees has been meticulous in ...”

“... Philip Frere pointed out that divorce would be fatal for his political career and recommended a ‘west wing-east wing’ solution, traditional among the estranged upper classes who had houses large enough for the purpose. Until she died in 1966 – suddenly, of a heart attack as she was putting on her boots to go out to a point-to-point – if they were both ...”

“... occasionally she dispenses more than the absolute minimum. Sentences that begin ‘We lived in the West Village’ or ‘This is how it was’ seem trusting, as if she has had a sudden flattering impulse of confidence in the reader. It doesn’t last. When Tomas, trying to understand the subtle shift in her behaviour, asks her if she is cheating on him ...”

“... Bill Haley and the Comets. We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy dedicates his book. Their increasingly grumpy pronouncements on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’ pepper the pages of Having It So Good. Of the new milk ...”

“... of trilogies in postwar fiction: Waugh’s Sword of Honour, the three wartime volumes of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time and Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy all dealt with the war itself, but the neo-Romanticism of the 1950s also created the appetite for richly coloured quasi-history which made T.H. White’s tetralogy The Once and ...”

“... queen’s consent. It was time for the establishment to bring up the big guns. On 1 October 1955, Anthony Eden informed the princess that the cabinet had agreed that if she went ahead with the marriage, she would have to renounce her royal rights and her income from the Civil List. In deploying this threat, the government could scarcely be said to be ...”

“... a letter apparently from Claire Tomalin, the paper’s literary editor, asking him to review Mae West Is Dead, Adam Mars-Jones’s selection of lesbian and gay fiction, adding that she would ‘expect a generous piece’. Waugh duly relayed this breach of professional etiquette to readers of the diary, whereupon Tomalin had no alternative but to sue. To ...”

“... Years. No true imaginative process has occurred. Virginia Woolf simply looked at Vita Sackville-West as she looked at Bogey Harris, however much the former may be dressed up in a style and a fancy. There is nothing to be done with Orlando, beyond seeing her in this way, just as there is nothing to be done with Bogey Harris beyond seeing him at the ...”

“... carried a ‘Letter from Paris’. The author had gone to Israel soon after the embarrassment of Anthony Eden’s ‘police action’ at Suez: she taught at the Hebrew University, wrote film scripts for the Jewish Agency, joined in an excursion to Russia. She was made aware of Israel’s ambivalent attitude towards Jews of the Diaspora, of a different way of ...”

“... printed letters without his permission: ‘Don’t do it again.’ He meant business. He wrote to Anthony Burgess in June 1988: ‘I hear you have been attacking me rather severely on a French television programme ... You have thought it relevant to attack me because of my age (I don’t see the point). You should have checked your facts. I happen to be 83 ...”