“... wheat from the chaff. The basis of the story he has to tell lies in the two enormous changes the war brought to MI5 and MI6. The sheer necessity of national survival and the huge expansion of the services had the effect of bringing a whole new wave of highly talented intellectuals into the services, which, until then, had been the exclusive fief of ...”

“... shoulder, like the disgusting foxes that rested around my mother’s neck. The 1950s, just after a war had ended, the children of a new era, the children playing in the bombsites of something that has never been imaginable. The Blitz, the sirens, the rubble. Born two years later and only a few bombsites remaining. Thrilling for us, warnings about all sorts of ...”

“... gives her the wrong colour nail polish (‘Damn Miss Rose!’). Meanwhile she is ignorant of the war and events around her: ‘started to read a book but too nervous,’ ‘looked at the papers but nothing in them.’ Orton’s Susan is a sweeter and lighter presence, whose reactions to the events of her life are more naive than narcissistic. ‘I think ...”

“... relatively humble academic existence was, he acknowledges, largely a matter of luck. Early in the war, the British government realised that the key to the country’s survival would be its ability to secure supplies of food and raw materials, for much of which it would not be able to pay. The answer could only lie in assistance from the United States. Roll ...”

“... of topographical maps overpainted with emphatic information of other sorts. In one, Second World War bomb damage is recorded and in another Charles Booth details the wealth or poverty of households. Black indicates total destruction in the former and abject poverty in the latter; yellow indicates upper-class wealth and ...”

“... is just comic, especially at the start of the film. Bonaparte is shown at school during a class on ‘islands’ – amazing what destiny can do to a syllabus. Corsica is described as ‘half-civilised’, and Bonaparte stands up, outraged, controlling himself only with difficulty. Then the teacher says (or a title-card says for him): ‘Oh, I was ...”

“... Empson taught literature in Japan from 1931 to 1934, and in China from 1937 to 1939. After the war he returned to China for five years before settling into a life divided between Sheffield and London. In 1932 he fell in love with some eighth-century Buddhist statues in temples near Nara in Japan, ‘the only accessible Art I find myself able to care ...”

“... Hague and Arusha (for Rwanda), are an attempt to show that achieving justice for the victims of war crimes, of crimes against humanity and of massive political persecution is not simply a matter of satisfying the grievances of individual victims. By stating that they will pursue the perpetrators of such acts to the ends of the earth, the Tribunals are ...”

“... haunted him since his childhood. As a boy, he tells us, he grew up believing that the Second World War was ‘a just and moral crusade’ ending in a victory over tyranny. The British had fought in the expectation that ‘with victory would come justice: those who had done evil would be punished, and those who had died would be avenged.’ But as a man he came ...”

“... written of the novels, Washington, DC, covers the years of the Depression, New Deal, Second World War and Korea; and the final volume, The Golden Age, takes the story to the millennium, though for most of its almost five hundred pages, oddly, it covers the years from 1940 to 1950, reworking and amplifying the historical material covered by Washington, DC. Of ...”

“... The exceptions of course were the Poles. There the Catholic Church had preserved across class barriers a stubborn and universal sense of national resistance which had gradually and peacefully found political expression in Solidarity: a body so clearly expressive of the national will that the regime prudently decided to admit it to a share of ...”

“... educate politically.’ Who is not ‘in the know’, in the relevant sense? ‘The revolutionary class of the time, the Italian “people” or “nation”, the citizen democracy which gave birth to men like Savonarola and Pier Soderini’ (Note sul Machiavelli). To keep the doors open is not easy, and not all will pass through them; there are many mansions ...”

“... gangsters, fought with the Italian Arditi, kept a mistress in Sicily, reported the Greco-Turkish war from the wilds of Anatolia’ etc, etc. He did none of these things, but he developed the skills to describe them better than if he had. And yet perhaps the truth is not entirely mocked. Even before we know about Hemingway we can feel that the pleasure of ...”

“... just a handful of the Morris Boys, was considered precocious troublemaking, and duly expelled from class as stylistically, politically and just about every other way-ally unfit for consumption or discussion. Harper’s used to know how to write in English, the gnarly old teachers said; Willie Morris brought the American jazz that made the language howl and ...”

“... She even hinted at a Missing Will. I listened and pondered.’ Shortly before World War Two, Michael dropped the name ‘Nathan’ and adopted ‘Wharton’. His wife had borne him a son and he wanted to make a new start in life, to become ‘more responsible, soundly based and honest’, now that he was a father. ‘I wanted to escape once and ...”