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“... introduction to the complexities of Guatemalan politics, and I merely assumed – with the Vietnam War and the less-publicised Guatemalan guerrilla war of the Sixties well underway – that another imperial satrap had received his just deserts. The taxi-driver, however, thought it was bad news. There was an evening curfew ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as the hills they allow us to pass, but their use was far from systematic until the First World War. Before then, Zweig tells us, ‘one embarked and alighted without questioning or being questioned,’ and ‘frontiers … were nothing but symbolic lines which one crossed with as little thought as one crosses the Meridian of Greenwich.’ Zweig himself ...”

“... that nothing surprised me.’ The exception, and rather different in genre, is ‘Incidents of War’, a sort of scrapbook memoir of soldiers’ written and spoken words in the years 1915-17, when Forster was in Alexandria as a Red Cross searcher; it shows a reach into areas of experience he was not to touch on elsewhere in his writings. Altogether 28 ...”

“... Beaverbrook and considered indispensable by Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The First World War had established him as a ‘press lord’, controlling the Express empire, as well as a member of the coalition cabinet. Soon Lady Diana herself would take the Beaver’s shilling and write a column in the Sunday Express until the editor managed to suppress ...”

“... The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the pirates’ patron), Charles I and, not least, Oliver Cromwell. The ...”

“... made to European civilisation by Can’t and Mendelzone’. Perhaps it was the old, lazy, upper-class way with Continental culture (Christ Church rather than Balliol speaking); perhaps it was Hailsham’s own insistence upon drawing attention to himself. The thin and rhetorical passages to be found here in Lord Hailsham’s memoirs about the infinite ...”

“... along, until exactly what he is saying sinks in: namely, that all London’s surviving working-class children eked a precarious living, shovelling horse-shit from the path of their betters’ patent leather shoes. There was undoubtedly a lot of it going on, but not that much. As Mayhew testifies, there seem to have been no more than a few hundred juvenile ...”

“... sit up, As well as exhibiting a tense familiarity with the habits of the English upper-middle class – the village fête, the rectory tea party, ‘the damp beehive in the summer-house’ – they were themselves impeccably well-bred: Joyce, Kafka, Baudelaire, a dash of Conan Doyle. In the late Twenties these were fashionable names. Best of ...”

“... reign, Naphta enjoys unprecedented prosperity; but after his death, the neighbouring kings make war on Naphta, and Naphta is utterly destroyed. Calasso’s interpretation of the story is characteristically opaque: ‘The legend of Kasch teaches us that sacrifice is the cause of ruin, but that the absence of sacrifice is also the cause of ruin. This pair of ...”

“... The most frightening of these concerns the Thursday immediately before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in June 1967, when Brown briefly found himself in charge of the Government in Wilson’s absence. Having successfully deputised at Prime Minister’s Questions, he made his way to the terrace of the Commons, where he encountered me. ‘You,’ he screeched in ...”

“... inventor who was old enough to have served in the Forty-Second Illinois Cavalry in the Civil War. His first and favourite brainwave was a pneumatically-driven street-car, which failed because the mechanism could never be made leak-proof (for the record, Pilbrow’s Atmospheric Railway and Canal Propulsion Company involved British investors in big losses ...”

“... it has any lasting value, it must be to the social historian with an eye for the vagaries of upper-class behaviour. The editor, Philip Ziegler, tells us that the King (George V) felt that an extended imperial tour by his first-born would not only strengthen ties of friendship but weaken the infatuation felt by his son for Mrs Dudley Ward. This cure for love ...”

“... solace can his swimming provide? Only the focus of the rush of fear, the primitive excitement of war: ‘Get the rhythm going ... Get a little high ... After the adrenaline of Vietnam, a six-pack ... just don’t cut it.’ A good many of the men and women in Jones’s fiction try to find a temporary release from pain in alcohol; but whisky, rum and tequila ...”