“... like Brandt, were German. The spread of TB was one of the legacies of the First World War. As Paul Delany tells us, in Germany TB sufferers doubled in number in the last two years of the war, when ‘soap disappeared completely, and the streetcars were foul with the distinctive stench of famine.’ Rolf Brandt, Willy’s younger brother,would later talk ...”

“... his Cruel Peace as an ur-text for students, bracketing it, ‘at the risk of immodesty’, with Paul Fussell’s Great War and Modern Memory), this one has been a great success. It has been widely and sympathetically reviewed in the national press without anyone questioning either its scholarly credentials or its ethical legitimacy. It also seems to have ...”

“... proud when they have a Piper window, the latest (and no more pleasing than the rest) glimpsed at Paul Scofield’s memorial service in St Margaret’s, Westminster. For all that, though, the book is immensely readable, drawing together so many strands of the artistic life in the 1930s and 1940s – K. Clark, Ben Nicholson, Betjeman and all the stuff to do ...”

“... easy conversational lines. The result is a trenchant monosyllabic lucidity that turns some corner and becomes wholly poetry. The lines to ‘My Dear Friend Mr Congreve’ can linger in the mind, seeming to mean much more than they should. ‘The Second Temple was not like the First’, and more bitterly, ‘Tom the Second reigns like Tom the ...”

“... Gareth Parry reported in the Guardian of 19 January 1979. Bomb-carriers, from The Secret Agent to Paul Theroux’s Deptford-based urban terrorists in The Family Arsenal, have delighted in targeting Greenwich domes. There is something in the nature of the place, a residue of royalty and privilege and congenital self-satisfaction: the old dockside dowager has ...”

“... what we were told: that the broad-spectrum antibiotics would work and Martha would ‘turn a corner’. But on Saturday, my day with her, she became dizzy and could hardly stand.On Sunday morning she said she felt ‘under attack’ and was dreading the day ahead. ‘What if the antibiotics don’t work?’ she asked. Her medical notes say she was ...”

“... influence of Durkheim with its special emphasis on structures. Both Raymond Aron and more recently Paul Veyne admit the influence of the sociological methods of Dilthey, Simmel and Weber in underscoring the specificity of historical events. In De la Connaissance Historique H.-I. Marrou attacks the narrow concept of what constitutes historical ...”

“... about American affairs for NOW which East Coast radicals, like Dwight Macdonald and Paul Goodman, were always assuring me should be disregarded as entirely mythomaniacal; they were nevertheless extremely entertaining. Reading his poems at the same time as his personal letters and his scurrilous public letters, I soon developed the image of a ...”

“... letter-writers. The most interesting are not the ones written to his brother from the Peter and Paul Fortress describing his mock-execution and pardon, about which he made little at the time, or the account he later gave his brother of his time in penal servitude. These things were all to be written up later by the novelist. Unlike Lawrence, Dostoevsky is ...”

“... battlefield archaeology team found a terrible concentration of musket balls and grape shot in that corner of the moor. It was there the battle was decided.This time, the Highland charge did not break through. The artillery barrage tore into them as they moved forward. ‘It has been calculated that the six guns firing into the centre and right of the advancing ...”

“... of US Forces in Nato, invited Zuckerman for a drink, and said: ‘We have painted ourselves into a corner. How do we get out of it?’ It isn’t clear that Zuckerman had an answer, but his logic forced people to put the correct questions. In 1964, Harold Wilson asked Zuckerman to go to the House of Lords and become Minister for Disarmament. Zuckerman very ...”

“... along with stories about musketeers. I killed giants vicariously; I liked the legends. In 1858, Paul Morphy, a boy from New Orleans, played a count and a duke in a box at the Paris Opera during a performance of The Barber of Seville, and chose to throw away his major pieces one by one, finishing with the most elegant mate imaginable. In ...”

“... storerooms, lighting their path with burning wads of Styrofoam. They headed for a specific corner, where an important collection of Islamic coins and the museum’s most precious cylinder seals were stored. They took more than 5000 cylinder seals and 5000 pieces of jewellery, but dropped the keys to the safes, so that the most valuable items survived ...”

“... so. Perhaps we are in the realm of that more general, sexually innocent homoeroticism discussed by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) or in Martin Taylor’s less fashionable, less thesis-driven anthology, Lads, republished in 1998. In Taylor’s collection, so often are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them ...”

“... sonnets, his most famous and least typical poems, which had just been praised by the dean of St Paul’s for their ‘pure and elevated patriotism’. Churchill’s threnody to an already mythical soldier-poet appeared in the Times three days after his death: ‘Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classical symmetry of mind and body, he was ...”