“... the one which did sweep the armoured knight from the battlefield, was carried out not by the low-class infantryman but by the knight’s younger brother, the cadet on a cheap horse carrying a brace of wheel-lock pistols. These have been sneered at by modern writers – how foolish, learning the caracole when everyone knows that cavalry must charge home ...”

“... have focused in a very precise way a number of possible attitudes which a great many middle-class intellectuals of the post-war period find useful for the purposes of self-definition.’ Yes, I would have been tempted to think Lodge was over-egging it too, if I’d happened to read his essay only a couple of months ...”

“... sometimes ‘to an alarming degree’, with ‘what he chose to call the “English” class system’. (The knighted Lamb began to insist on being addressed as ‘Sir Larry’ in the office; it wasn’t long before he was replaced by the private-school educated, wannabe barrow-boy Kelvin MacKenzie.) Now that Murdoch has 131 other media enterprises ...”

“... are these? In what sense can such behaviour be termed normal? The damaged nature of so many upper-class Englishmen is surely structural rather than accidental. In Hogg’s case the death of his mother when he was 17 appears to have added considerably to the emotional damage. Utterly egocentric, he was an isolated figure, wanting love but unable to give ...”

“... here is well known. Lakatos had been active in the Communist resistance towards the end of the war. On the lam, he abandoned his Jewish name, but kept the ‘L’ so as not to waste his monogrammed handkerchiefs (Lakatos, which means ‘locksmith’, is a common enough lower-class Hungarian surname). He then joined the ...”

“... was a joke. As a founding myth, the Russian Revolution was largely displaced by the Second World War, and the Brezhnev regime seemed more committed to gradualism than any Fabian. To be sure, in the postwar period the Baltic states and Eastern Europe received a Soviet-taught Short Course in revolution from above, featuring such prewar staples as ...”

“... dynasties that flourished across the world between the fall of Napoleon and the Second World War. The story of these remarkable family businesses is far from hidden, though poorly understood. In the beginning were the patriarchs: Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), a contemporary of Goethe, who started off dealing antiquities in the Frankfurt ...”

“... one’s foreign opponents seek to publicise one’s activities, but the continuing bureaucratic war for scarce resources not infrequently leads intelligence services to boast of their past coups. Moreover, when military intelligence becomes really important – that is, when there is a war on – large numbers of outside ...”

“... breakthrough in the Reichstag elections. They met in a small, musty room ‘in a third or fourth-class hotel in a very grubby street’, which at the time was the Nazis’ advance headquarters in the capital. ‘I was led upstairs into a tiny bedroom’ with a rumpled bed, where Hitler was waiting for him. He ranted at Ebbutt for forty minutes, speaking ...”

“... Schwindelns’, a chronic deception or swindle. Hofmannsthal disdained the standard middle-class public for literature and theatre and no doubt opera (certainly he disdained the Strausses, whom he found severely trying in person, though he was delighted with the way Richard transformed his earning potential). Of impressively aristocratic bearing ...”

“... By spring​ 1919, Robert Graves was a demobilised war veteran, a new father and the author of four volumes of poetry. At this moment came ‘the first poem I wrote as myself’, as his autobiography describes ‘Rocky Acres’. After surviving years of front-line bombardment, a shell splinter through his right lung and the postwar influenza epidemic, Graves had returned to his cottage in the Welsh hills ...”

“... surrender monkeys’. As Howard shows, French diplomacy has been involved in a continuous war of manoeuvre against the Anglo-Saxons. Its existence has rarely been acknowledged, so Howard’s study is especially valuable; though there are some lacunae and a few mistakes it also contains a great deal of useful material. He starts with the confrontation ...”

“... populism – a tone in which Crossman was to be something of a specialist. During a fairly good war, which he spent in the weird and suggestive interstices of the Political Warfare Executive, Crossman seems to have become an early private fan of the emerging ‘special relationship’: admiring the broader American resources and broader American minds, and ...”

“... night before a cataract operation. His courtship had been all but shattered by a religious tug-of-war, which led to a nervous breakdown: he clung to the mysteries of Christianity while his bride-to-be was a sturdy Unitarian. His daughter quotes from their courtship letters, as she later quotes from her own. At Oxford, as the Zuleika Dobson of the ...”

“... about my novels?’ The novels were not quite forgotten, however. Johnson sees the First World War as crucial in rescuing Austen from the ‘Aunt Jane’ tradition. In 1917 the travel writer and horticulturist Reginald Farrer published a centenary essay in the Quarterly Review, marking the transition from Victorian Janeism to a modernist version that saw ...”