“... celebrated for his flamboyant, scandalous love-life and his nationalist posturing, the First World War poet-soldier who helped create the rhetoric and culture of Italian Fascism. Much of his work is virtually unreadable today, while an impressive body of lyric verse has been obscured by the behaviour that won him so much notoriety during his lifetime. A ...”

“... the new designation caught on, English doctors recognised the malaria of Italy as a member of the class of intermittent fevers that was kin to – and perhaps the same as – the agues known to afflict the inhabitants of the Fenlands and the coastal and estuarine marshes of Kent and Essex.There were all sorts of creeping, crawling, flying and buzzing insects ...”

“... for any of the things that posterity believes went wrong on his watch. In the case of the American War of Independence, in Roberts’s trenchant words: ‘Just as George cannot be blamed for the war breaking out, therefore, neither can he be blamed for losing it.’ Fifty years ago, Brooke went even further: We may be ...”

“... When, shortly before the Second World War, Freya Stark was asked by a publisher if she would write Gertrude Bell’s biography, she turned the idea down. Although she admired her famous predecessor as a fine traveller and considered Amurath to Amurath one of the best travel books she’d read, Freya was not ‘very fascinated by her as a woman ...”

“... its own world’. The Symmeses’ esoteric interests faded as they settled into lives of middle-class rectitude, but their ‘pot and pantheism’ was a powerful influence on Duncan: ‘It was not a dogma nor was it a magic that I understood for myself … but I understood that the meanings of life would always be, as they were in childhood, hidden away, in ...”

“... those of his friends on the left who feel the subject to be unimportant alongside the issues of class. Nairn derides not merely the ‘Royal Socialism’ of the Labour Party but the whole Ukanian notion of ‘class’, which here denotes a sort of lumpish, self-encapsulating and self-perpetuating ...”

“... I turned the tables and asked the students about Gypsies – whom only one girl in the whole class could tell me of, because she was one. Political leaders, however, don’t generally talk to students, and never discover the dream they seem to harbour that Australia should be a truly alternative West. Our present masters were no sooner in office than ...”

“... for tonight’s flight. When I changed my ticket, they reminded me that Continental has no such class on this flight, though I’ll avail of it on the Virgin flight back. Maybe they’ll reimburse me the difference? I go back to the desk and explain the situation and am delighted to be bumped up from economy to first ...”

“... woman), ‘the use of sterilisation in the fight against feeble-mindedness centred on lower-class women of questionable moral standards,’ and (in Mallory’s case at least) depended on a rationale that came down to the charged phrase ‘incapable of leading a clean and proper life’: the feeling that her mothering was not up to scratch. At this end ...”

“... week, every term for three years. Shortly before Ellis arrived, every student was getting a Leavis class four times a week. Supervisions on their essays were usually with one of Leavis’s former students, hand-picked to cement the great man’s precepts. The big events were the classes with the master. One of these classes is memorably imagined in ...”

“... city-state, the formation of Christendom, the rise of capitalism and the stirrings of working-class resistance.Moral philosophy had suffered especially badly from this ‘lack of historical sense’. The notions it deals with – ‘courage’ and ‘compassion’, for example – may be abstract, but they are not inert: they can provoke acts of violence ...”

“... And then the men turned to their studies. Before long, almost every man was enrolled in a class, and some in three: classes on Marxist-Leninist theory, on economics and psychology, on literature and languages, and on history ancient and modern. As they remarked, they were privileged to have time to read and write and discuss. Except that they didn’t ...”

“... procedures, avoid the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure. The tourist class was invented by Thomas Cook when he assembled an excursion to the Paris Exposition in 1855. Tourists change their places in groups, live as comfortably as possible, take pleasure in gregariousness, obey injunctions, keep to the main roads, and fulfil plans ...”

“... to write about subjects in the forefront of popular consciousness: American football and nuclear war (End Zone, 1972), pop music (Great Jones Street, 1973), communications from outer space (Ratner’s Star, 1976), clandestine intelligence (Running Dog, 1978), terrorism (The Names, 1982), suburban life and ecological disaster (White Noise, 1985), the ...”