“... examiner at military school just before the Revolution (he ranked the future emperor 42nd in a class of 58) and a decade later welcomed his former student as a mathematics fellow in the new Institut de France: ‘We expected everything from you, general, except geometry lectures!’ Laplace was in many ways the Bonaparte of physical sciences: their ...”

“... in the Morning Star, he has aligned himself with a new generation of popular protest – anti-war, anti-globalisation – as well as remaining as soundbiteable as ever on hardy perennials such as European integration, industrial democracy, reform of the House of Lords and the royal prerogative. Benn is fashionably unfashionable. The smoking classes have ...”

“... France as a free country.’ By the end of the Reign of Terror in 1793-94 and two decades of war with other great powers, the loss of life had turned out to be much greater than Dorset thought. Yet the awesomeness of 1789 as a model of human emancipation inspired revolutionaries of various kinds – liberal, socialist, anticolonialist – worldwide until ...”

“... not convert their errors into anything but folly. But why is this? And who are they?They are a class, as Roy Foster says, the old Ascendancy in Ireland. Elsewhere Yeats borrows a phrase from the poem to talk about Lady Gregory, who is said to be ‘indifferent to praise or blame’, a quality attributed to the law that was one of the pretty toys ...”

“... yarn about a group of English officers and men in northern France near the end of the First World War; and it is narrated by one of them, a large working-class innocent called Humberstall, in peacetime a hairdresser. An alcoholic young lieutenant, Macklin, arrives in the battery and starts up a Jane Austen Society. Its ...”

“... insist there should be no second-best solutions for countries just because they are poor and war-torn. Too often, the same coterie of international civil servants decamps from contracts in Kosovo to East Timor to Liberia, bringing with them the same working culture and the same formula for state-building. State-builders ignore vernacular politics, to the ...”

“... of a certain noblesse oblige. They probably believed that sentiment had its origins in an upper-class conviction that ratings were naturally as well as institutionally and socially inferior to officers, a conviction they had long since rejected. They were, however, quite clear about the advantages of rank, and if for some it had entailed notions of ...”

“... it would no longer be necessary to supply it with faulty intelligence about Iraq, nor would the war between the two states be allowed to go on as it has for the last eight years. Since Saudi Arabia had already been dragged into these schemes, one could foresee Israeli and US planners delighting in a forecast that would include bilateral negotiations between ...”

“... Benn returned the feeling. Having learned to fly himself in the RAF towards the end of the war, he had glimpsed the great pyramid of repute which mounted from humble students like himself towards the shadowy apex where the mighty test pilots belonged, men like Trubshaw and his military counterparts Roly Beamont and Eric Brown, men who were stuffed with ...”

“... Her most recent novel, Gier (published in English as Greed), concerns a man not dissimilar in class and background to Josef Fritzl. Kurt Janisch is a country policeman who kills a 15-year-old girl by pressing on her carotid artery while she is giving him a blowjob in the back of his patrol car, and then dumps her body in the local lake. The considerable ...”

“... the trappings of the culture they most strongly identified with, the Scottish Lowland upper middle class to which their mother belonged: armies of servants, big houses and neo-aristocratic leisure pursuits. My father was born in Madras (now Chennai) in 1936. Apart from a brief visit when he was six months old he first saw Britain aged nine, at the end of the ...”

“... of Nations’ was noted in 1870 – the sight of two country lovers during the Franco-Prussian war – but not given poetic form until 1914. Such memories, like the poetic spark that’s ‘frozen and delayed’, are the source and resource of the great late poetry. It is a poetry of dispersed memories, not of shaping autobiography, haunted by the lives of ...”

“... hidden it deep beneath princess-and-pea layers of material: Florence after the Second World War (Innocence), Moscow just before the First (The Beginning of Spring), Cambridge at around the same period (The Gate of Angels), pre-Napoleonic Saxony (The Blue Flower). One imagines the author building up the research, bit by bit, joining it from many ...”

“... of the poet, the poetry was usually treated as quite impersonal. It had come, in the post-war years, under heavy academic protection: this was a time when potent professors wanted to exclude biography from the institutional study of literature. Eliot’s own doctrine of poetic impersonality had contributed to the formation of this austere ...”

“... his destination as 414 West First Street, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Unfortunately, his third-class ticket was for the Titanic. The other, ‘Hadman E.’, was recorded among the columns of the dead on the King’s Cross war memorial. Heroic efforts by Anna, trips to Kew, Clerkenwell, days trawling the ...”