“... opinion which should have formed their natural constituency. ‘Flunkeyism’ and the lack of self-respect which it denoted were Bright and Cobden’s habitual explanation for the unaccountable failure of the middle class to perform the historic role for which they had cast it. It is the merit of G.R. Searle’s study to show that matters were more ...”

“... issued in December 1943 by the newly-formed Reed and Harris publishing house, with an outrageously self-praising blurb comparing the author with Rilke and Kafka. ‘The plain fact is that Mr Harris cannot write,’ A.D. Hope observed, before going on to charge the young firebrand with plagiarism: ‘We have a Zombie, a composite corpse, assembled from the ...”

“... force it told the incident-packed story of an inspired and inspiring career cut off at 44 by a self-destructive death. It showed what confusion there was in the early development of a young artist of limited talent and uncertain direction. It demonstrated how he found within himself an intuition of the course he had to take, an uncharted course for which ...”

“... new attributions cohere with the older ones in ways that save the phenomena. To put the point in Robert Brandom’s Hegelian way: to understand the nature of an object is to be able to recapitulate the history of the concept of that object. That history, in turn, is simply the history of the uses of the various words used to describe the object. As Jonathan ...”

“... Establishment between the wars, and especially the gap between its rhetoric and its ambitions. ‘Self-determination of peoples’ had been a con-trick as far as the defeated peoples of 1918 had been concerned; so was the League of Nations. ‘Reparations’, the Gold Standard, German Democracy, the Little Entente were all of them bogus – like the Maginot ...”

“... emergence of Dominion status is one obvious example of that. The commitment, however vague, to self-rule for India, and the dependence on the good will of the Indian princes, are another. The great miscalculation of German policy before 1914 was the assumption that the world was waiting to be liberated from British oppression. Instead, enough of the world ...”

“... short-suffering Mosley with his other help-meet Diana Guinness née Mitford. Mosley’s biographer Robert Skidelsky avers that ‘Mosley always tried to maintain the old English distinction between private life and public life.’ But Mosley came up against that other, even more powerful, old English tradition or law which has recently snuffed out ...”

“... drinking club. Especially (but not exclusively) on the left, it was also a culture in which self-education, conspicuous erudition, even philosophical speculation were tolerated as they were not in other union cultures. The brightest star in the left firmament was the Fife miner, Lawrence Daly, who rose to the post of NUM General Secretary under the ...”

“... did not ideally suit him to army life. Nor did things improve when his friend Major-General Sir Robert Laycock arranged for his transfer from the Commandos to the Guards. If anything, his time in the Guards was even less happy than his spell as a Marine. When his superior officer, Lord Lovat, who had seen him drunk in the bar at White’s every day of the ...”

“... its concomitant scorn for ‘thimble bellies’), Sayre recalls it as celebratory: ‘of the self and of friendship’. She quotes A.J. Liebling: ‘People whose youth did not coincide with the Twenties never had our reverence for strong drink ... It was the only period during which a fellow could be smug and slopped concurrently.’ As long as he ...”

“... it’s difficult to tell what that means, except in contrast to Hunter’s muddled careerism and self-destructive hedonism. The portrait of Beau Biden that emerges from this book is that of a man who seems, from a young age, determined to become a more perfect version of his father, i.e. a more perfect politician. ‘My father believed Beau could one day be ...”

“... empire’s intention had always been to lead all its territories and races towards ‘responsible self-government’ and – conceivably – to independence.Such nonsense! It’s still humiliating that anyone accepted that bedtime story. As Ian Patel writes in We’re Here because You Were There, decolonisation ‘was from a British perspective ...”

“... published a book ‘on the programme’s significance’ in 2017, Defining the Discographic Self. It even has its own urban myth, in which Brigitte Bardot tells Roy Plomley that she wants ‘a peenis’ for her luxury. Choking on his microphone he eventually realises she means ‘’appiness’. Bardot never appeared on Desert Island Discs – but ...”

“... Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci; the American neoconservatives Daniel Pipes, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer; and – the maître à penser of the ‘Eurabia genre’ – Gisèle Littman, a British woman of Egyptian-Jewish origin who lives in Switzerland and publishes under the pseudonym Bat Ye’or. (It’s striking how many Eurabia theorists write under ...”

“... phenomena, Cartledge argues, rendered less congenial both Thucydides’ ‘severe, and somewhat self-deluding claim … to tell objectively and accurately only the actual facts of the past’, and his decision to limit those facts to ‘significant political, diplomatic and military events and processes’. But the recent expansion beyond Thucydidean ...”