“... old-fashioned ideas on the upbringing of children and a deep scorn for the railway network. The Britain she governs bears a plausible relation to the Britain we live in now. It is a soulless place. Notions of public welfare have succumbed to the dominant culture of enterprise and profit. Public services barely ...”

“... had contested the seat unsuccessfully in 2010, turned the 14,671 majority his Labour predecessor, Ian Davidson, had won in that election into a 9950 majority of his own, a swing of 35.2 per cent. There were similarly large swings in the other Glasgow constituencies. The SNP had transformed referendum defeat into general election triumph, and a permanent ...”

“... early 1960s it was very unusual indeed. Hecht said he had managed to ‘anger the whole of Great Britain to the remarkable point of being officially boycotted (as if I were a one-man enemy country)’, and his memoir wasn’t published in the UK. The paperback I read must have been bought by my father when he visited America.What struck me most at the time ...”

“... emigrants from the war in Europe were making their way across borders, continents and oceans. In Britain, hitchhiking established itself among the armed forces and then more widely in the years of austerity and petrol rationing that followed. It was one way of responding to appeals to the collective good and empathy with the plight of others – ‘banal ...”

“... and removed his quotation from ‘the sex-and-violence literature’ of James Hadley Chase and Ian Fleming: he substituted writing of his own, not guying these offensive writers, but carefully imitating them, in pastiches which few recognised to be imitation – since Hoggart’s point was, partly, that such writers have power and skill. Hoggart is an ...”

“... and former literary editor of the Spectator), there is now no literary reviewing worth the name in Britain: The days have vanished when reviewing was a ‘serious’ matter. The articles in the Sunday papers are far too short to be able to do justice to a book. The New Statesman has collapsed, so has the Times Literary Supplement. Very occasionally one gets a ...”

“... Cranborne, meanwhile, was dealing with entreaties from Lewis Namier that German Jews be let into Britain. Cranborne thought him ‘a most tiresome person . . . he is not to be trusted. We cannot say enough to Jews of this type that people do not become refugees until they leave.’ Lyttelton, on the other hand, was in Frankfurt during Kristallnacht and saw ...”

“... and poetries, from Black Mountain and Objectivism to Yvor Winters and the ‘plain style’. In Britain he is more likely to be known as a deviant Movement figure, author of such books as Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy, and as a poet who, while initially espousing Movement plainness, refused to meet his readers halfway (halfway was ...”

“... physical hygiene or the route to a cure. Nineteenth-century provision of social welfare in Britain was dominated by the belief that the basic problem was not poverty but pauperism. If relief could be so organised as to be intolerable, and people would starve rather than accept it, pauperism would be lessened. This was the basic ‘less ...”

“... of the vote, providing the first glimmerings of their possible seriousness as a political force in Britain. They then faded away, but were now contesting about 250 seats in this election. Were they keeping quiet about it, or were the media too taken up with the cut and thrust of the three main parties to report what the Greens were saying? When I went to a ...”

“... appointments: the latter were all shot. Some things have changed in the interim. The prospect of Ian Paisley attaining the Attorney-Generalship which was Sir Edward Carson’s eventual pay-off is commonly agreed to be remote, but this is not the only notable point of dissimilarity between present and past. One of the most extraordinary and unexpected results ...”

“... as the Fisher King. This is Henchman, a world-famous photographer, who has come on the round-Britain cruise on which all the characters of the story are embarked, together with his beautiful companion of the moment, Barberina Rookwood. It is not possible to take wholly seriously a character called Barberina Rookwood, and that is probably Powell’s ...”

“... a masterpiece is to go on trying to write very large, ambitious books. But our contemporaries in Britain don’t seem to be interested. And the second reason is a related one: readers, including reviewers, are also programmed against Major Novels. It is sometimes said that the Booker jury always has at least one man- or woman-in-the-street on it, to prevent ...”

“... newspapers and journals (the line of influential poetry reviewing stretches from Edward Thomas to Ian Hamilton). Sooner or later, the taste which innovating literary journalists shape and enforce seeps through to institutions of higher education, which then disseminate it to their students, many of whom transmit it to the next generation of ...”

“... 70s, the country did become financially and, to some extent, politically a client of France and Britain. However, Egypt under Muhammad ‘Ali was certainly not a client state of France. Although it was then nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, it was an imperialist power in its own right. Not only had the Egyptians occupied Syria and Lebanon, but Ibrahim ...”