“... These limitations become more apparent when Hitchens writes about the Left. He tears into Michael Foot for his ‘treacly exaggerations’, his awful sentimentality, his Beaverbrook-worship and his ‘glutinous style’. Fine. But the fact that his general angle of attack on Foot is from the left, and his judgment that Foot ‘has never been otherwise ...”

“... conviction that theory was antithetical to research is captured in his remark that Christopher Hill – master of Balliol in Cobb’s time – was ‘not really MY sort of historian. He has IDEAS and he does not really like ARCHIVES.’ The hermeneutical bent of much Continental and American historical writing left him cold. ‘Soon,’ he grumbles to ...”

“... opening section, ‘“Two Acres”’, is set in 1913. Two Acres is a pleasant house in Stanmore Hill inhabited by Freda Sawle, a youngish widow, and her children Hubert, George and Daphne. Writing in the third person, with each chapter tied to one character’s point of view, Hollinghurst stages a weekend visit from Cecil, who’s at Cambridge with George ...”

“... to tell the difference between them. Clark’s quip (although it wasn’t really his) about how Michael Heseltine had to buy his own furniture was widely cited as the nadir of bona fide toffdom. But was Alan Clark himself a toff? His family millions had been amassed by his great-grandfather, a Paisley textiles merchant. Newish money, then, but older ...”

“... from a novel by James Jones, who had written From Here to Eternity; it focused on the taking of a hill in the Guadalcanal campaign; and it was crowded with regular soldiers depicted by big Hollywood names – Malick’s legend had grown such that the stars were eager to work for him. But The Thin Red Line is not conventional. It doesn’t personalise the ...”

“... manufactured mythology even as it built itself on the ruins of the Communist counter-culture. Michael Denning, in his long interpretative history The Cultural Front, has questioned this disdain. His notion of the culture of the Popular Front embraces sturdy proletarian sagas like Mike Gold’s Jews without Money and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath ...”

“... political edge could be tolerated: anyone who showed any sign of that kind of talent was, like Michael Heseltine, bound to come to grief. By 1987, when the Leaderene had won her third straight election, the Cabinet was stacked with rabbits, nerds and characters with sufficiently low testosterone levels to endure repeated handbagging. Crucially, when ...”

“... up the slopes towards the French positions. In his classic account of the war, the historian Michael Howard described what happened next:The field officers on their horses were the first casualties. The men on foot struggled forward against the chassepot fire as if into a hailstorm, shoulders hunched, heads bowed, directed only by the shouts of their ...”

“... other early Congregationalists wanted to signify by that place name: Salem was a city set on a hill for a newly founded Puritan Israel. Armchair travellers may prefer to turn to YouTube to revisit the recent royal wedding, and the communal singing of a peculiar poem by William Blake that has gained national anthem status. It was not much thought of until ...”

“... the damn thing, use a system of ropes and turnstiles to manoeuvre it up and over the intervening hill. At one point, he began to wonder if he should play Fitzcarraldo, because the task (Aufgabe) set by his Carnac obsession had turned the film’s protagonist into a version of himself. Forty years after its release, he remains a student of prehistoric ...”

“... in middle age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... in his dead uncle’s house, thinking: ‘Tomorrow he’d lie in the earth on the top of Killeelan Hill. A man is born. He dies. Where he himself stood now on the path between these two points could not be known … He must be already well out past halfway.’The second letter in this book is from 1957, when McGahern was working as a teacher in Dublin. ‘I ...”

“... in the corridors of power: some of the Moonie ‘sisters’ even gained permanent jobs on Capitol Hill, notably Susan Bergman, who became an assistant to the House Speaker, Carl Albert. Before long various Moonie front organisations had won the willing patronage of numerous conservative Congressmen and Senators – including Robert Michel, the Republican ...”

“... our tried institutions with an openness to change when practical considerations prompted – what Michael Oakeshott later called ‘intimations’. The trouble is that Burke himself, like many other conservatives, tended in practice not to recognise such intimations. Nothing could have been more obvious than that rotten boroughs ought to be abolished and the ...”

“... insurance for those of 50 and over’. Excepted from these strictures about Classic FM is Michael Mappin, who keeps the bad jokes to the minimum, isn’t wearingly cheerful and has some specialised knowledge, lightly worn, i.e. he is like an announcer on Radio 3. Most of the others are scarcely past the stage where they snigger at foreign names. 17 ...”