“... 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 ...”

“... silks and spices, currants, dyes and soft leather among the British elite, the rising mercantile class and (we are told) even ‘humble peasants, labourers and servants’. Mather’s discussion is organised around two themes: the roles of three major trading centres – Aleppo, Constantinople and Alexandria – and the careers of a series of individuals who ...”

“... the idea of travel. Perhaps – and for the Nicolsons there are few greater sins – it is middle class, like saying ‘weekend’ or getting a knighthood. She went twice to Persia because her husband was on a posting there, and while there was never any suggestion that she would exchange her glittering English existence to keep house at the legation, she ...”

“... who says things like ‘J’habite Metroland’ in his orals is riding lawlessly in first class when he becomes the captive audience of an ‘old sod . . . dead bourgeois’ who gives him a rundown of the distinguished history of the line. One of its finest achievements, the boy learns, was to lay on two Pullman coaches (Mayflower and Galatea) for its ...”

“... in Malay, which he had brought back from years spent in a Japanese concentration camp during World War Two? Not to mention the bishop, described in the Congo Journal as ‘a wonderfully handsome old man with an 18th-century manner – or perhaps the manner of an Edwardian “boulevardier”’? What if this ‘pilgrim of the dry season’ – the sarcastic ...”

“... Spud and Sick Boy, thrawn and desperate sons of the disintegrating Scottish industrial working class, became such poster boys – literally – for the bright new Scotland of the early 2000s, with its craft beers and its blond-wood, obscenely overbudget parliament building. ‘Buying a Trainspotting postcode in 1996 was a solid investment,’ I read the ...”

“... moment at which the demand for mixed colleges occurred. This was the era of civil rights, anti-war protest and women’s liberation, causes which convulsed campus life across the Western world. The demand for coeducation can be read as one more sign of the egalitarian and febrile mood of the times. Although cultural revolution provides a noisy backdrop, it ...”