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“... The first thing about Harold Macmillan was his bravery, and it was the last thing too. In the Great War he was wounded five times, at the Battle of Loos and at the Somme. At Delville Wood he was hit in the thigh and pelvis and rolled down into a large shell-hole, where he lay for the next ten hours, alternately dosing himself with morphine and reading Aeschylus ...”

“... little more than a common ideology – and by the sense of shared grievances that the West’s ‘war on terror’ was likely to foster among Muslims. The concept of ‘leaderless jihad’, now much in vogue among so-called terrorism experts, is to a great extent al-Suri’s invention. Considering his belief in leaderless jihad, it’s remarkable that al-Suri ...”

“... fighting. For the British it was, militarily and symbolically, one of the worst disasters of the war. It proved to be an intensely personal disaster for the more than eighty thousand Allied personnel who were captured that day. Worst of all was life in the makeshift camps set up in the jungle for those sent to work on the construction of the railway line ...”

“... soldiers welcomes us like greeters at a conference. We fill in forms for accreditation to the war. Halfway down the forms ask: Do you need anthrax? Do you need smallpox? We answer no. I had the first anthrax injection in London last week. Paul hasn’t been vaccinated for either. You’re supposed to have three anthrax injections to be protected. We catch ...”

“... in Victorian architecture, as evidenced by the baroque North London cemetery, full of middle-class tombs like Pharaonic vaults, in which both Flora Milk and the contemporary narrator find inspiration. The principal historical puzzle in the novel concerns not the Pharaohs but the nature and appeal of Victorian Spiritualism, a craze which spread throughout ...”

“... a blood relation, so it seemed, to almost everyone in the upper – that is, the newsworthy – class. Whoever we were hunting down with a telephone, a Who’s Who and an envelope of press cuttings would turn out to be a ‘cousin’: if not a relative, a schoolfellow; if not a schoolfellow, a neighbour; if not someone who lived near his family in the ...”

“... North-West. They also had public advantages. They might gain in prestige and influence in time of war by recruiting regiments from the sons of their tenants: in return, the tenants expected to continue in their holdings. But by the 1840s the adverse publicity resulting from the Highland clearances meant that the great power of an estate to order people’s ...”

“... who was going to wind up bottom of the heap. The Irish won but, judging by Bainbridge Avenue, the war is not over. Though undoubtedly the ugliest aspect of the Irish presence in America, racism isn’t its only blemish. Almost as hard to take is the collective idiocy of St Patrick’s Day, when green beer is swilled by men whose shaven heads have been ...”

“... or cafés, where he gradually discovered the one true gift he possessed – for agitation. World War One rescued him from a miserable existence. The Army was his first experience of a regulated social life, in close contact with others, and also gave him recognition for his achievements as a soldier. The military defeat and the collapse of Imperial Germany ...”

“... to what Senator Moynihan sees as his country’s historic loss of nerve, following the Vietnam war, and its retreat from the leadership of what he considers to be the cause of liberty. He looks back with nostalgia to the crusading ideals of President Wilson, the pinnacle of American prestige in the world, and to their reassertion in John F. Kennedy’s ...”

“... was a different vision. ‘That by which a State is advanced,’ they held, ‘is agriculture and war,’ and they supposed that human behaviour is best determined by the judicious application of pleasures and pains. Like many theorists of this persuasion, they found the pains easier to provide than the pleasures. They urged savage laws. Yet although the ...”

“... met at intervals in different places – in Singapore, in Yunnan, in Hanoi. He got mixed up in one war and I in another; it was all a long time ago, and the world we were swanning about in has disappeared. Civis Romanus sum – that was what an Englishman in the Far East used to feel at the beginning of this period. Later we unlearnt that, but my impression of ...”

“... is journalism, a topic touched on in his first novel, God’s Pocket(1984), set in working-class Philadelphia. The new novel is about a crime, and has a crime thriller’s feel, but as in some police procedurals, the milieu of the investigator, in this case a journalistic milieu, overshadows that of both criminal and victim. The investigators in ...”

“... What follows is the familiar brilliant travelogue, with observations on the Portuguese colonial class system and the mindless social round. Occasionally there is a burst of anger, as when a restaurant owner torments a man who is laying tiles for him: With us, and his other customers, the owner was as civil as always; but then, switching character and ...”

“... selling hats along the south coast for the firm of Ayres & Smith. He had served in the First World War, and the outbreak of the Second all but ruined him when Ayres & Smith turned their production over to military headgear. He persisted nevertheless, setting off day after day, decade after decade, as fashions changed and fewer people wore hats of any ...”