“... But the recollections of people who came into the City before or not long after the Second World War leave a consistent impression of a system which worked rather well. It really did seem (or so I’ve been told by people who remember it) like a club – for men only, needless to say. The club’s veteran members were assumed to know what they needed to know ...”

“... descend to a maximum of about fifty metres, where the air pressure is six atmospheres, and world-class free divers go down to about a hundred metres, where the pressure is ten atmospheres – more than enough to tell the human body that it doesn’t want to be there. Normally functioning submarines, meaning subs not designed for the special purpose of ...”

“... city that overcame the challenges of Napoleon’s blockades to the imperial capital that made war on the Boers. Like White’s previous survey, London in the 20th Century (2001), this book is at times very funny. He quotes a letter in which Dickens describes the parochial fire engine that put out a small blaze at the offices, just off the Strand, of his ...”

“... TV, all the Arabian channels you can stare at, Coronation Street dubbed into Arabic – class!), so being the experienced guys we are we sat and waited till it was over. On leaving the TV room I saw why the Yanks will never win a war. They were running all over the place in what can only be described as a mass ...”

“... being seized by the settlers, leading to a decade-long period of violence known as the Black War. The Aborigines formed raiding parties who lit decoy fires, stole from food-stores, and occasionally attacked bystanders with their spears. The colonists campaigned loudly for action to be taken. In 1830 the infamous Black Line was thought up by George ...”

“... a few random and suggestive samples. Strachey was a solitary explorer, writing in 1918 for a war-weary public that could tolerate Victoriana only in small, savoury doses. He could not foresee the Victorian Revival: the huge appetite that would send a navy of researchers across the ocean of evidence, lowering buckets, trawling nets, and bringing to light ...”

“... us about a marriage between an elderly Ukrainian man, who came to Britain after the Second World War, and a younger woman newly arrived from the Ukraine. Her new book, Two Caravans, has as joint protagonists a group of migrants who meet strawberry-picking on a Kent farm. Lewycka’s fictional world speaks of 3D jobs (dirty, dangerous or difficult), and of ...”

“... contributions from Western and Russian palaeontologists; research hidden for decades by the Cold War now became available to specialists all over the world. The display of these geological wonders has a fascinating history of its own. The progressive sequence of life, familiar to any visitor to the fossil galleries at a natural history museum, was first ...”

“... general feeling was that America was getting what it deserved: ‘Since the beginning of the Cold War, the United States has engaged in colour revolutions in other countries, incited unrest, caused uprisings, and now it has finally hit itself.’In the years since his visit to the US, Wang has risen to the top of the Chinese Communist Party. His official ...”

“... South Africa. As an antiwar campaign, the encampments recall protests against the Vietnam War, including the Student Strike of 1970, which grew significantly after the murder of four Kent State students by the Ohio National Guard.The encampments are also a parody, in Alareer’s sense: emerging from within the university, they offer another ...”

“... as any Communist leader to achieving some part of the ludicrous imperative to ‘make the working class the ruling class’. Now, the workers are one of the largest constraints on a pro-capitalist government: to create capitalist structures, the government must strip them of power, security and, in the first stage at ...”

“... acquired that distinctive, delicious air of normality in a time of upheaval, when life and war brush shoulders, both waking up each morning bemused and surprised to find that the other still exists. The park, perched on the edge of a vast building site that was threatening to consume it, became a tent city and a centre of protest for all kinds of noble ...”

“... butchers wouldn’t in any case be its usual retail outlet and certainly not Bennett’s High Class Meat Purveyors of Otley Road. What about trotters, were they on the ration? No, and tripe certainly wasn’t, though even at 81 it still seems droll to me to be regarded as a historical repository or the oldest inhabitant. The VE Day programme treated ...”

“... the general staff of the Conservative Party. The Tories used to be fond of saying that the idea of class struggle was old hat. Believe that, sir, and you’ll be ready to credit any damned thing. Even before Thatcher carried the vote of no confidence in Callaghan, she had commissioned her friend Nicholas Ridley to design a campaign of revenge on the ...”

“... Christopher’s sisters married a tailor, a shoemaker and a glover. This tough, industrious class nurtured much of the budding literary talent of the time: the Elizabethan leather industry provided a livelihood, not only for Marlowe’s family, but also for that of Robert Greene and William Shakespeare, sons respectively of a Norwich saddler and a ...”