“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was impossible to get the camps and the SS taken seriously. Bettelheim was imprisoned before the war in Dachau and Buchenwald, and has given his story in The Informed Heart. From personal experience he saw only what Germans were doing to Germans – and over the whole period of the camps up to 1945, what happened inside Germany was to be an almost ...”

“... advertisements in the personal column of the Times: ‘A good breast of milk available; first-class references’. Not that Esther, a betrayed kitchenmaid from a gambling-mad big house, can afford to advertise her bounty: she has to rely on word-of-mouth recommendation. In her penniless extremity she contracts to supply her milk to the baby of a well-off ...”

“... today had to dismiss six boys. They were found behind the tombstones with women of the serving class.’ The young Deedes found a job on the Morning Post. He felt sorry for the unemployed but lived in a Waughish world well removed from such miseries. He and his friends, finding a Mrs Trampleasure in the London phone directory, took turns ringing her to ...”

“... story ‘The Conductor’, in Love and Obstacles (2009): ‘I was not in Sarajevo when the war began; I felt helplessness and guilt as I watched the destruction of my hometown on TV; I lived in America.’ He means it’s boring in comparison with the character he’s discussing, a Muslim poet from Sarajevo who stays put for the siege and later awes ...”

“... desperate defiance of Hitler, but from the reader’s, necessarily, they are taking part in World War Two (1939-45), its end date fixed, its outcome known. It’s not easy to put aside our knowledge and inhabit their innocence. In The Stranger’s Child Alan Hollinghurst went to some trouble to shake the patronising certainty of retrospect, setting the first ...”