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“... and if, for example, such typical boys’ reading as Jules Verne and the short stories of H.G. Wells stoked his enthusiasm for a career in science, and I should also like to know how he came to write so well in the straightforward narrative style of Daniel Defoe. But on all these matters we are left to guess: we learn the facts about his life and nothing ...”

“... vetted by MI5 (this didn’t end until the 1990s), its embrace of commercial structures under John Birt, director-general in the 1990s, and the shadier aspects of its foreign language broadcasting. Arguments about the relationship between the BBC and politics usually concentrate on its journalistic output, ignoring its cultural programming, but then the ...”

“... of itself,’ he says in his Study of Thomas Hardy, a sentiment which might have been uttered by John Stuart Mill himself. But what Lawrence meant by ‘self’ was not to be confused with the ‘cheap egotism’ of the ‘self-conscious little ego’ described by modern individualism. ‘I know that life, and life only, is the clue to the ...”

“... the literary guard: from the Great Victorians to the Great Moderns (Hardy, James, Conrad, Kipling, Wells), and from the Great Moderns to really modern Modernism (Pound, Lewis, Eliot, Joyce). It also has much to say about the commercialisation of literature during the period, about literary agents, about booming and book wars. ‘So,’ Ford remarks, ‘if one ...”

“... at the edges of philosophical debate, sometimes in the company of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, H.G. Wells and the Webbs. Today they are easily characterised as an unripened Bloomsbury Group: a celebrity clique composed of men and women unconventional in dress and conversation, literary and artistic, overlapping in their sexual commitments, but – also ...”

“... operators to space warfighters’. But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John E. Hyten, has described space war as ‘inevitable’.The American strategeion sees itself as waging a constant battle against complacency. To ward this off, the political class periodically conjures up imminent threats to US superiority. In the 1990s the ...”

“... UK’s forced departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in September 1992 had condemned John Major’s government to nearly five years of public disintegration, years in which the party’s anti-European ‘bastards’, as Major described them, reacted to the abrupt end of belief in Tory competence by doing their best to scupper his ...”

“... vigorously: over-vibrating concrete would shake the gravel to the bottom.’ He finds that even John Betjeman, the arch-Victorianist and founder of Private Eye’s ‘Nooks and Corners’ (originally called ‘Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism’), admired the design, to the point where he wrote a letter of appreciation to Lasdun: ‘I gasped with ...”

“... 1952 choked bankers and paupers alike (it brought a performance of La Traviata at Sadler’s Wells to a close because no one could see the stage). In the years immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over ...”

“... he looked at, Lorck looked at in a peculiar way. One bundle of drawings, which the diarist John Evelyn owned, was split up and sold at auction in 1966 – the compilers of this catalogue have been advertising rather forlornly in the art trade press for news of their whereabouts. The catalogue is Fischer’s life’s work. Many have worried about what ...”

“... host to camel nomads were now barring their migrations, and stopping them from using pastures and wells. Hilal rebuked me for not speaking Arabic like an Englishman: all colonial officers had been schooled in classical Arabic, not the Darfurian Sudanese version I had picked up. He said that the last Englishman who had enjoyed his hospitality was Assistant ...”

“... she wanted to meet – leaders of governments-in-exile, naval commanders, bomber pilots, H.G. Wells, the boy-king of Yugoslavia – was made available. Churchill played host at a country-house weekend. The queen had her to tea at Buckingham Palace. Anthony Eden took her to the movies. Drawbell wasn’t satisfied. In the book he wrote about Thompson’s ...”

“... told me, ‘has to be converted, in the most organised fashion, into hundreds and thousands of gas wells. It’s like the original oil era. They’ve tricked a lot of public land by offering inducements that haven’t been followed up on. It’s rocks and hard places for everybody, in terms of energy, from now on.’ The windscreen of the hired car detaches us ...”

“... An imaginative American policymaker might have decided to treat this inflow like proceeds from oil wells, directing it into a ring-fenced sovereign wealth fund, which could have been used to fund much needed infrastructure projects or an industrial policy to match those of China and Germany. Instead, it was Wall Street that profited in its role as the chief ...”

“... on the day the Archduke was shot). He was born rather higher in the social scale than H.G. Wells, for his father was the manager of a small factory which had been built up, from artisan beginnings, by his own father. The family was quite prosperous, and Carr went to Merchant Taylor’s, where he shone. Even as a child, he was a somewhat unpopular ...”