“... the water. Homes were burnt down. Prisoners were lined up on the bank of a ditch and shot. I took the book with me to Mogadishu, Somalia, and found that reading a chapter of summary soldiering in My Lai was a busman’s holiday after a day of anarchy and gunfire. Four Hours in My Lai is distinctly putdownable, by which I intend only praise. It argues ...”

“... return to later. The first volume of the biography, Pottle’s James Boswell: The Earlier Years, took him up to his marriage and the age of 30. The pattern of his life – and its central indecision, which was never to be resolved – had already been laid down. At one end of the still only precariously united kingdom, Boswell played the parts of an ...”

“... subject-matter, with a style which paid close attention to the detail of natural appearances and took themes of an aesthetically and morally elevated sort – is clear enough. The results evoke responses which are nothing like as simple. From the first the Pre-Raphaelites were able to rouse both anger and admiration; a Soho sex shop with Burne-Jones posters ...”

“... occupying a hundred pages, exactly a third of the book, the texts of 16 programmes Orwell wrote or took part in. Like a surprised prospector who has accidentally struck gold on terrain declared worthless by geologists, West exaggerates the size of his claim and the value of his ore. Literary criticism is not his strong suit, and I would not rate him highly as ...”

“... for them with schools. It does not fully deal with the cultural claims of the myth. Children took two years or more to learn to read and would come to writing skill only as a subsequent supplement. The Kirk urged parents to put their children to school to learn to read: it did not expect more. Prestige certainly attached to writing skill, if it could be ...”

“... and local archives and working under the Jacobin historian Georges Lefebvre at the Sorbonne. He took up his first lectureship only in 1955, at Aberystwyth (which thereafter loomed largest in his extensive demonology of provincial Britain), and after a year in Leeds in the early 1960s he moved to Oxford, spending a decade as a tutorial fellow at Balliol and ...”

“... equipment needed to make a firm diagnosis. At the Nuova Clinica Latina, a prototype PET scanner took cross-sectional images of my brain that revealed a fracture in the lower left rear (parieto-occipital) region of my skull. The X-rays didn’t show any bone splinters round the edge of the fracture, indicating that whatever hit me might have been ...”

“... in London and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate ...”

“... employment with regular hours and weekly pay. At the same time, the ‘white blouse revolution’ took another tranche of women into new commercial and professional jobs – teaching, nursing, education, clerical and shop work. ‘The servant problem’ – related to the ‘getting and controlling of servants’, as the OED of 1911 defined it – was ...”

“... the next day with an old pram and started the business of transferring them to my room at home. It took several journeys there and back to remove them all. But at the end (discounting the religious tracts and such like) I had a set of a hundred or so quarter-leather uniform hardbacks, ranging from Dumas and Gil Blas to Napier’s Peninsular War, an almost ...”

“... won the war they would never be forgiven; and it was in this desperate state of mind that Truman took the decision – with Attlee’s assent – to drop the first atom bombs. Had nuclear deterrence had to depend merely on scientific warnings or even the evidence of nuclear tests, it might not have worked. But nobody could doubt the evidence of Hiroshima and ...”

“... him only what they thought he wanted to hear. Reality rarely managed to break through. Hartwell took a close interest in the City, but it was gossip rather than expertise that he picked up. He showed how feeble his grasp of financial matters was in 1984, when the freehold of the Fleet Street office was sold to a property company and leased back at a rent of ...”

“... of Canterbury. Instead, he resigned from Harrow with almost no warning at all, and in 1860 took a decidedly unglamorous living as vicar of Doncaster. The highest he was to reach in the Church was Dean of Llandaff. The secret of his puzzling resignation probably lies in a story told in the memoirs of John Addington ...”

“... more representative of the tergiversation of the times than at first appears. Oxford in the 1840s took the double strain of the combat between the Evangelical tradition and Anglo-Catholicism and the invasion of what Newman saw as the real nightmare enemy – intellectual liberalism or ‘the wild, living intellect of man’ torn free from institutional ...”

“... drunkenly against the window. Then there was the smell, which was fetid and slightly sweet. It took me a while to find the source, and when I eventually pulled up the floorboards there was nothing left of the rat but a shrivelled sack of skin and fur, its tail a mangy question mark. I donned washing-up gloves, picked it up by the tail and put it in the ...”