“... when a Conservative government was cutting the Navy Estimates so far back that the Falklands War was very nearly lost before it had begun? The truth is, I suspect, that party politics has always been a contest in which own goals count for more than well-directed strikes from the opposing side. Asquith may, in his prime, have been ‘the greatest ...”

“... the reader’s comment pointed out, ‘there was plenty of jumping in and out of bed.’ But then war broke out, and I took it away from the agent because he was having no success in placing it. I told myself that this was because of the wartime paper shortage. Everyone knew that it was impossible to get books published in a ...”

“... implications of a particular way of imagining politics and human life. In the context of the Cold War – and The Origins was pre-eminently a Cold War text – this view had the attraction of assigning responsibility for the evidently disastrous state of international relations firmly to the other side, whose beliefs were ...”

“... novel as an account of the dreary adulteries of ‘good people’ in the decade before the Great War, as a peculiar blend of bovarysme, sexual ignorance, faked illness and disastrous bouts of lust; or you can read it as a sort of allegory of the social and spiritual disorder that eventually caused the war (hence the ...”

“... Profumo lied like a trooper. Martin Redmayne, who was without doubt the worst Chief Whip since the war, failed to see through his mendacity, though his job was to know the strengths and weaknesses of his flock. I am surprised that someone as clever and worldly as Iain Macleod should have believed Profumo, but I doubt that Deedes contributed much more than a ...”

“... young Scottish sectarian thug: he is an impoverished, disaffected, prospectless victim of a wider class battle. The fissiparous nature of Ulster Protestant militias – ‘UDA, UVF, UFF, UR’, as Rebus reels them off – doesn’t stop the excluded hooligan’s yearning to find in them a galvanising identity. Having a side in a fight is what ...”

“... whole novel right there.) In 1950, one pair of ladies’ white knickers (‘retrieved from the 3rd Class Compartment’) and a lot of handbags. On Christmas Eve 1955, a person left their false teeth on the 10.30 train to northern parts, but thankfully only ‘the upper set’. The 1960s got off to a good start with the loss of a ‘pair of dancing ...”

“... to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, in your home in the Sudan / You’re a poor benighted heathen but a first-class fighting man’) and in his early novel The Light that Failed produced a graphic account of the action Newbolt refers to, when a square was broken and a regiment all but destroyed. (Susan Chitty refers to Newbolt’s meeting at Clifton with ‘a survivor of ...”

“... The Criterion, T.S. Eliot’s periodical, ran from shortly after the First World War to the very eve of World War Two. Or, if one prefers, from one of Eliot’s major bouts of depression to another. The two time-schemes are, in fact, related. In 1921, the business negotiations to finance the proposed journal had to be suspended when Eliot suffered a nervous breakdown; it was during his convalescence from this illness that he wrote The Waste Land ...”

“... city of half a million people. Since then, with the influx of a steady stream of refugees from the war-torn interior, it has grown into a sprawling conurbation with an estimated population of five million. Town planning wasn’t on the government’s list of priorities during the war, and the city’s slums look more like ...”

“... style, let alone movement – existing between, say, the 1870s and the end of the Second World War, the trend would be a gradual ascent with some stunning vertical spurts before and after the First World War. In his new book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, the inordinately prolific and widely admired Peter Gay has much ...”

“... through and through, to the logic of monetary exchange – and the nature of capitalism and class struggle. Marx now had a folder to himself, as did Fourier and Saint-Simon. There were new dossiers on the Stock Exchange, the Working-Class Movement, Professional Revolutionaries, the Commune, the materialist ...”

“... that he conceived and named the policy of containment pursued by the United States during the Cold War. It was, he said, ‘designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world’. The policy was set out in a 5000-word telegram he sent from Moscow ...”

“... to make peace with them. Based on essays which appeared in the New Yorker this summer, The Longest War has the advantage of immediacy, of intimacy. The anguish it describes, an anguish located in the first-person plural employed almost throughout, has not been tempered by time. Written in the form of a journal, The Longest ...”

“... salacious books with titles such as In the Grip of the White Slaver, The Girl That Disappears and War on the White Slave Trade. The plot varied little: as J.P. Wilson wrote in The White Slave Traffic in 1912, ‘her slavery lasts some five or six years as a rule, and then she is flung out upon the streets, her character gone, her hope dead, her body ...”