“... mother bombarded him with advice; his tutor at Cambridge was the future archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift; and his godfather, the Earl of Bedford, provided him with a seat in Parliament. But he was short of money and had expensive tastes. He became a barrister at Gray’s Inn, rising rapidly to become a highly successful advocate and legal adviser to ...”

“... Command’s list of military facilities to be destroyed. At the end of the war, Ivan Hirst, a major in the engineers, arrived to inspect it. He found that 70 per cent of its buildings and 90 per cent of its machinery were still intact. The British Zone of Occupation had to cater for the transportation needs of 22 million inhabitants who possessed only ...”

“... for Community in Postwar England. The book is based on a careful rereading of the records of ten major community studies in postwar England (Lawrence doesn’t look at Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland). What a treasure trove those investigations bequeathed. Lawrence begins with an examination of working-class attitudes and aspirations as revealed by the ...”

“... though David Scott of Apollo 15 has become a recluse, Armstrong doesn’t do interviews, and while John Young of Apollo 16 made a speech at Smith, both eye and mind contact seemed impossible for him. None of them found celebrity easy, least of all the crew of Apollo 11, for whom there were no predecessors to show them how it was done. Caught between a ...”

“... became all but invisible. Fortunately, in 1962, a new campaign of restoration was undertaken by John Brealey, under the supervision of Anthony Blunt. The results were remarkable. Although the pictures now displayed in the Orangery at Hampton Court are obviously little more than shadows of their former selves, and one could not be restored at all, enough has ...”

“... know where the face or the value of the collection lay; the only thing that was clear was that a major poet had arrived and the Romantic era was over. The title page of the volume carried a dedication in French and English and an epigraph in Italian: ‘For Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915, mort aux Dardanelles’, followed by those lines of Statius to ...”

“... though more often in the background. Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme and John Keegan’s The Face of Battle are the mini-masterpieces I remember from school; this century, Antony Beevor, Max Hastings and Holland have led the British pack. The history of war is now certainly more palatable to academia: King’s College, London has a ...”

“... led all three to look with a more critical eye on statism and ‘planning’. Gandhi was a major influence: his emphasis on community development and discomfort with ‘materialism’ dovetailed with ethical socialist traditions that had long sought to develop character traits and habits – altruism, solidarity – that would overcome antagonisms of ...”

“... talking seriously to their US counterparts, including Cold War scholars such as Melvyn Leffler and John Gaddis. Radchenko, more than twenty years younger and so essentially post-Soviet, arrived in the US as an exchange student (improbably, from the island of Sakhalin in the Pacific), wrote a PhD on Sino-Soviet relations under the supervision of Odd Arne Westad ...”

“... the morning’s savagery. As a novice freelance among legendary correspondents from the world’s major newspapers, wire services and television networks, I knew my place: listen, observe and never pontificate to elders scarred from wars in Palestine, Korea, Malaya, Suez, Belgian Congo, Indochina, Algeria and a dozen other colonial battlegrounds familiar to ...”

“... dumb activities in this dumb working-class school about the dumbest was shop: Elvis Presley’s major.’ Nor does Goldman intend that Elvis’s friends should do him credit. Here is a verbal snapshot of ‘lifelong friend and companion, Red West. Red is a senior at the time, a tough, aggressive, football-playing poor boy, whose ribs are visibly deformed ...”

“... loomed large in 17th-century thought. Millenarians and Messianists like Isaac La Peyrère, John Dury and Peter Serrarius expected the recall of the Jews to Palestine any minute, where they would rebuild the Temple and set up a government. Arguments about whether they would return as Jews or as converts to Christianity were common. Menasseh ben Israel ...”

“... journalism, universality is mocked. White complains that minor gay art is called ‘gay’ while major gay art is called ‘classic’ or ‘canonical’. There is muttering against ‘the bourgeois recuperation of all dissident literatures (and of gay literature in particular) through an appeal to universalism ... At this point it might be worth mentioning ...”

“... the midst of life we are in employment.’ Or this of his time at Sydney University: ‘a major in English made one a minor Englishman.’ He is clever, too, at distancing himself wryly from modern technology, as in his line about computers failing to take over the work of translators because they insisted on reading ‘out of sight, out of mind’ as ...”

“... about the size and capability of the enemy forces. A day or two before the ‘invasion’, Sir John Glubb informed Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, that the Zionists had 65,000 trained men. Azzam was surprised by this but replied: ‘I expect it will be all right. I have arranged to get up seven hundred men from Libya.’ On being asked ...”