“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... how those trapped in the situation could have taken those other ways out. War with Argentina is self-evidently a ludicrous way of making the simple point that a transfer of sovereignty ought to take place only with the consent of the Falklanders; thirteen months of hardship, picket-line battles, lost production and the huge expenses of generating ...”

“... understand, are the pure products of disordered digestion’. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton wrote that the stomach is the ‘king of the belly, because if he be distempered, all the rest suffer with him.’ Early 19th-century physicians agreed: ‘It is a great mistake to regard dyspepsia as peculiarly or especially a disease of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... York this season is the Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and ...”

“... happen if their certainties were abandoned, desperately struggling to maintain their sense of self, afraid of each other’s contempt, they staggered from idealism to self-destruction.There was an enormous cultural response to the suicides. The following year, the film Germany in Autumn was made, with contributions ...”

“... exoticism was going forever to refute his understanding of them. In practice, indeed, he struck a self-conscious balance between what he did and didn’t understand as a traveller, or, in the terms which he favoured, between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’: the creative play between the two, once the Exote is in situ, is simply a local transposition of ...”

“... nights, criminal operations and complicated political double-dealing. The collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach pointed out in 1943 that it was an ideal setting for detective stories, and Patrick Marnham’s gripping book is a detective story of sorts. It recounts the life of a man who was, in himself, particularly opaque. Jean Moulin was ambitious and ...”

“... was the author of these novels, until I noticed a tiny credit on the title page: ‘Text by Robert Arthur’. I looked ‘text’ up in the dictionary to double-check it meant what I thought it did. It was disappointing to discover that Hitchcock himself hadn’t written any of these stories, but it didn’t stop me from wolfing them down.In the late ...”