“... Ask who the leading young British novelists are and you may well be told Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, Julian Barnes. Given that writers typically have long careers and get better with age, ‘young’ is not entirely a misnomer applied here. Like politicians, novelists can be youthful long after the point at which the careers of athletes or ...”

“... understand why psychoanalysis in Britain should have achieved this preeminence. The story in its broad outlines is by now familiar. In 1926 Melanie Klein, bereft of intellectual support in Berlin after the death of Karl Abraham, accepted Ernest Jones’s invitation (mediated by Alix Strachey) and settled in London, where her ideas gained a sympathetic ...”

“... stucco-fronted standards, high taste and low morals. In his ebullient vulgarity and lack of any broad social vision he could not have been more different from Schinkel. Sadly for posterity, however, Nash was out when Schinkel called; though Mrs Nash received him. ‘He lives like a prince,’ Schinkel noted, with some disapproval. He found Nash’s terraces ...”

“... how, for example, should the health pound be divided between Aids and other diseases? – and broad enough in its account of the way institutions have responded to the epidemic to achieve at least some of his larger aim: to ‘write a history of Britain over the last ten years with Aids at its core’. But even this, because it is a view from the ...”

“... The Titanic was a ship of fools. As John Wilson Foster tells us, the grand staircase came in William and Mary style, though the balustrade was Louis XIV; the first-class dining saloon and reception rooms were Jacobean, the restaurant Louis XVI, the lounge Louis XV (Versailles), the reading and writing-room late Georgian, the smoking-room early ...”

“... sheer size of their accumulated wealth. The combined assets of the five houses gave the concern a broad basis on which to spread risk and counteract unfortunate developments in any single market. In effect, the unity of the brothers in five different economies kept the entire operation stable. The constant attempt to compare and contrast illuminates the whole ...”

“... World War would have to be completely re-written now seem exaggerated, but there is a need for broad reappraisals to take account of what is known now about all kinds of intelligence and covert activities. Professor F.H. Hinsley and his colleagues are fulfilling this task meticulously and with clinical detachment in their official history of British ...”

“... School; and that Sir Thomas Watson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society some ten years before William Budd, Conan Doyle’s partner in general practice as a young man. A Sherlock became Dean of St Paul’s near the close of the 17th century; there was a Portsmouth cricketer named Sherlock; of a certain Patrick Sherlock, another contemporary of Conan ...”

“... became a central preoccupation of power politics in the later 16th century, in the generation of William the Silent and Coligny and Sir Philip Sidney – and of Sidney’s mentor Hubert Languet, a leading orchestrator of Protestant cooperation in Europe but an absentee from Prestwich’s book. In the early 17th century the same international concerns ...”

“... he is quick to catch what he calls its ‘ache, or regret, or conjecture’. He greatly admires William Morris. He is snappish when young (Dickens ‘has added nothing to our understanding of human character’), stealthy when old (‘What Mr Conrad’s left hand gives back ... is simply Mr Conrad himself’), but he is always severe, and demanding. He is ...”

“... house, with the ground-floor bay window and the attic, at 40 Richmond Road, Leicester, where William Edward Snow and his wife Ada Sophia brought up their family of four sons. Ada Sophia had a nose like that of the most distinguished of her sons, with a slight downward curve. She had ‘dignity of bearing’ – another resemblance to the future ...”

“... desirability of strong, stable government by a virtuous, able and authentically British élite’. William Pitt was an especially important symbol of this new élite: his well-known private virtue (‘prettygirlibus indifferentissimus’) made him for many the model of what a public servant should be, even if for others he seemed entirely contemptuous of the ...”

“... and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster ...”

“... Pavilion, there is a monument in which large statues of J.J. Roberts, the first President, and William Tubman, head of state from 1944 to 1971, face one another beside an inscription listing the country’s Americo-Liberian leaders under the portentous heading: ‘These men have governed Liberia.’ The 19th-century colonising elite of American freed ...”

“... few historical figures introduced to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century city. As ...”