“... turbulent period. And no book has done more to illuminate the outlook of the 17th-century ruling class. Pocock showed its insular preoccupation with the common law and the ancient constitution, with the medieval language of custom and precedent, and thus explained its inability to understand the events that plunged it into civil ...”

“... more specifically, the sort of view that Germans associated with English gentlemen, an admired class of persons who could not help but patronise everything outside their own immediate circle, even though they were great travellers and took a keen interest in other peoples. I saw what he meant, and he suddenly smiled and said, ‘Greenmantle, you ...”

“... Bell’, in reference to the superefficient German generalissimo of the Great War. Her son Quentin, born in 1910, contributes a charming brief memoir which recalls a frequent device employed by his mother when answering the London telephone.   ‘Museum 5596.’   ‘Can I speak to Mrs Bell?’   ‘I am afraid Mrs Bell is ...”

“... Vendler’s Chamber of Horrors’, French theory, and ‘the deformed, uncandid class-consciousness of our domestic criticism’. It opposes them, much less specifically, with what would appear a libertarian, childlike, very late Romantic poetry of ‘the body’, ‘the voice’ and ‘the new recklessness’. The ideals are ...”

“... hadn’t been drinking,’ added my aunt, a little too quickly. My father, who spent the war with the Sea Scouts spotting mines in the Mersey, involuntarily did his bit for the Third Reich by putting his foot through the hull of a canoe. The first I knew of the docks was the cranes you could see from Wallasey. You could look out across the river at ...”

“... husband was called ‘Bror’. He is mentioned only twice in the book, unnamed: ‘When the war broke out, my husband and the two Swedish assistants on the farm volunteered and went down to the German border ... My husband wrote and instructed me to load up four ox-wagons.’ Tommy and Cockie don’t appear in the book at all. Not all the old ...”

“... of the Party: they shared with Russia all they had themselves put into fighting the Germans in the war. Colonel Lev Ovisishcher, one of Shcharansky’s fellow martyrs, was an ex-pilot and political commissar, who had gone up in a small plane with a megaphone at Stalingrad, to try to urge the Germans to surrender. Martin Gilbert’s account of Shcharansky’s ...”

“... have had to be omitted.’ On Jane Austen: ‘She is as critical of the current practice of her class as she is admiring of the ethical theory that sustains it.’ On Scott: ‘Revolution is more genuinely his subject than Scotland is.’ On Byron: ‘Byron now succeeded Scott as the most fashionable author of the day, and he did so because his ...”

“... novel’, more generally the humorist-humanist vein of embattled liberalism in post-war British fiction. He is a familiar face on the TV arts circuit, a familiar voice in the literary press. He has stood on both sides of the fence in the Booker stakes, being chairman of the judges in 1981 and a short-listed nominee (for Rates of Exchange) in ...”

“... in times of crisis – a prediction confirmed, for example, at the time of the First World War and again during the McCarthy era, when all the branches of government joined in sanctioning egregious violations of free speech. Indeed, in 1798, only a decade after ratification, Congress enacted the Sedition Act, outlawing public criticism of the federal ...”

“... to his sexual orientation: as a teenager, he began to realise that he was gay. In wartime and post-war France, that was a predicament: it harrowed Foucault to the point of attempted suicide until he met his lifelong lover Daniel Defert. In 1959, it even got him expelled from a teaching post in Poland after meeting a boy who turned out to be a Communist police ...”

“... north in the spring of 1803, calamity struck. Margaret and the baby were taken ill in Florence, war broke out again between Britain and France, and there were anguished discussions in the English colony about how to get home. ‘Ransoms were speculated upon – chains and dungeons glanced at – gentlemen went off in disguise at the peril of their lives ...”

“... During the war Anna Kavan worked for nearly two years at the offices of Horizon. ‘Understandably, Connolly was never comfortable with Kavan,’ Michael Sheldon wrote in Friends of Promise, his book about Connolly. He was presumably referring to her heroin addiction. Friends and mentors over the years – Rhys Davies ...”

“... of the final, most troubling stage of his career. In the years leading up to the Second World War motorsport had became heavily politicised. Just after the Nazis came to power in 1933 Hitler opened the Berlin motor show with a speech in which he announced tax cuts for car owners, an ambitious plan to build autobahns across the country, and to develop what ...”

“... couldn’t stomach the triumph of a long-suppressed Bengali nationalism. Instead, they declared war on East Pakistan. A well-organised massacre of Bengali students and intellectuals followed, and many of my acquaintances and some close friends perished. The generals who organised these events and the politicians who supported them were unrepentant, blaming ...”