“... behind the German lines. He did so in the Special Air Service regiment, newly founded by Colonel David Stirling, and engaged in some lively rough shooting among the enemy encampments. At one point he was very close to Rommel. There was a crack Greek Sacred Squadron and it was the obvious unit to join next. Eventually he saw the shattering of the Mareth Line ...”

“... a book as meticulous as it is generous. It is nonetheless timely: just as the prison service has brown-filled this pleasant site, so, too, New Labour has trampled on the radical socialism of which Lansbury was one of the finest exponents. Despite having a historian for Chancellor and assorted chroniclers of the Party’s history on its back benches, the ...”

“... in December 2006 – ‘whether we want to replace them’? The reason seems to be that Gordon Brown was eager to create jobs for BAE shipbuilders in the North-West, while Blair wanted to ensure that the UK would continue in its role as spear-carrier to the US. The US first agreed to provide the UK with submarine-launched ballistic missiles – the Polaris ...”

“... lack of complexity is also the reason he lends himself to popularising accounts like this one. David Bather Woods writes in a deliberately non-intimidating style as he takes the reader through the various stages of Schopenhauer’s uneventful life. He was born in Danzig in 1788 and visited London as a teenager, where he made sure to drop in at the Bedlam ...”

“... the cry of Blairite cronyism can be added a still louder cry of class treachery. But what of it? David Kirkwood, one of the original Red Clydesiders of the Twenties, ended up in the House of Lords, and the Glasgow shipowner Joseph Maclay was made a minister by Lloyd George in December 1916 without being required to sit in either House of Parliament. The ...”

“... that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey Hart, remember it first and then study it up in order to flesh out their memories with circumstantial detail. In either case, historiography is given the task that Wordsworth assigned to poetry: to reconcile the seemingly unrelated worlds ...”

“... wilderness, Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn had at last been accepted for publication: Larkin and David Cecil had independently named her as their choice of ‘most undervalued writer’ in the 75th-anniversary number of the TLS. As Pym’s diary records, they had kipper pâté to start, after sherry; and then ‘veal done with peppers and tomatoes, Pommes ...”

“... Labour landslide year, that the first Nuffield election study appeared, with the hand of a young David Butler already apparent. It was, sadly, a jejune and disappointing volume which explains very little of the last great realigning election of modern times. Since then Butler has taken an increasingly dominant role in the enterprise and the books have ...”

“... In a speech​  at the University of East London in February 2010 David Cameron, then leader of the opposition, promised to lift the lid on ‘secret corporate lobbying’. The ‘far too cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money’, he said, would end on his watch. The full text of his speech isn’t easy to find – the Conservative Party erased ten years’ worth of speeches and press releases from its website in 2013 – but the internet doesn’t forget ...”

“... and the other never really bothered to roll the dice. Lipsyte, now 51 years old, graduated from Brown at a time when theory reigned; he came of age in the 1990s, the decade when the figure of the slacker slouched through the zeitgeist. His early stories – which became his first book, the story collection Venus Drive (2000) – were published by Open ...”

“... treated as the decisive moment in the transition from British to US dominance in the region, but David Wearing shows that, in spite of Suez and other setbacks for Britain on the periphery (the 1958 coup in Iraq, the civil war in Yemen in the 1960s), British influence in fact increased in the core Gulf states over the next 15 years, with successful palace ...”

“... damned at her feet: Marianne Faithfull, the ‘Fabulous Beast’ herself, doing a photo-shoot for David Bailey, ‘sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny 55-year-old thighs’. Melvyn Bragg, filming his reaction shots for the South Bank Show, ‘smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his ...”

“... sounded over the grumble of jammed traffic. With a final, ironic caress from the fingertips, a brown hand despatched a metal globe. It landed, hopped to reveal a small moon-crater, and curved slowly in a scatter of hard dust. The thrower remained a stylish, temporary statue: knees not quite unbent, and the right hand ecstatically spread. I noted a furled ...”

“... on the Soviet Union’.* In 2009 the Ministry of Defence commissioned Lieutenant General Chris Brown to carry out a review of British strategy, later released under the Freedom of Information Act as the ‘Operation Telic Lessons Compendium’. Brown concluded that the army hadn’t been prepared for the occupation, and ...”

“... England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ...”