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“... from the University, he led his platoon in a dangerous uphill charge against a German position north of Salerno. For this he was awarded the Military Cross, and ended the war, twice wounded, as Captain Howard. Returning to Oxford, where he had already obtained a first in Part I of Modern History, he set his sights on an academic career. But as a ...”

“... she ends up in her old job as barmaid at the Midnight Bell. It is instructive to compare John Updike’s literary persona with that of Hamilton, for in many ways they have almost exactly the same kind of talents. Both are experts in the area where social comedy abuts on the most precise instinct for what a society is like, and what details and ...”

“... 330-mile railway that will link the capital with Birmingham and then split to run, in a Y shape, north-west to Manchester and north-east to Leeds. Diwana is just outside the proposed footprint of the new station but, as Salique puts it, ‘There will be this Berlin Wall between us and the station which is actually the ...”

“... community. 5. Concentration on Iraq is a distraction from the more acute danger posed by North Korea, which has greater nuclear potential, a more powerful army, and an even deadlier leadership. The US should give top priority to dealing with Kim Jong Il, not Saddam Hussein. 6. Even if an invasion of Iraq went smoothly, an occupation of the country is ...”

“... the IRA now allowed its political wing, Sinn Fein, to contest elections in both the South and North, a tactic that secured a considerable measure of success in the North, but not in the Republic. The rapid rise in the Sinn Fein vote to form one-third of the total nationalist vote made an eventual majority for ...”

“... in general. The past itself is alterable, since the future casts it in a new light. Whether John Milton belonged to a species which ended up destroying itself is up to us and our progeny. The future possibilities of Hamlet are part of the play’s meaning, even though they may never be realised. One of the finest English novels, Samuel Richardson’s ...”

“... wonder at the scene below, when I saw – for the first time in all those years – the sun on the north side of King’s College Chapel, throwing long shadows I never imagined could exist.About five years ago my flying went through a bad patch, and on one particularly miserable flight I determined to give it up. I flew back to Cambridge airport, joined the ...”

“... 23 months, yet in March when the tremendous blow strikes, the news that somehow or other, while in John Stuart Mill’s care, his just finished first volume, which pleased him ‘better than anything’ he had ever done, had been used as kindling, he and Jane respond without bitterness and with total courage to the emergency. As Carlyle sets out to write a new ...”

“... sofas in the 1950s had broken springs. Once they had buoyed up culture heroes like Rupert Brooke, John Cornford or Guy Burgess. Now, as we trudged across the great Gromboolian plain of the 1950s, they had given up the struggle. Modish undergraduates perched on the arms. Jonathan, new to the place, tried to sit down and slid backwards into the depths. All I ...”

“... Politics is unmistakably an academic work. But it has no special affinity with the law schools of North America and is on the whole best understood in terms of the two, very different political experiences which stand behind it. One of these is the turbulent polities of Brazil, the vast, disorganised and economically dynamic Third World power which he still ...”

“... night a couple of months after my return, seated at my desk upstairs overlooking the street in our North London suburb with the sodium lamps playing on the curtains, I stayed up late, writing. When I woke the following morning I had plunged from mania into terror. Looking back now at that time I see myself sitting at my desk not daring to write ...”

“... with the practices of an acquisitive society. In the potlatch, Kwakiutl notables in the American North-West competed in the public destruction of their most valuable possessions. In Gueule de pierre, the obstructive father-figure, who is also the local mayor, wins a small-town equivalent hands down by taking a submachine-gun to the mountain of crockery he ...”

“... embodied in MacDiarmid and Grassic Gibbon (1922-35), the flow of oil and gas from the bed of the North Sea (1977-?). It may be that our nationalism is on a par with feminism as Dale Spender sees it: for ever having to be painfully rediscovered, rather than evolving continuously from strength to strength, without relapses between those peaks where ...”

“... The best summation of the importance of naval position was given in 1904 by the British admiral John Fisher: ‘Five keys lock up the world! Singapore, the Cape, Alexandria, Gibraltar, Dover. These five keys belong to England.’ But if you leave strategic bases aside, it is often the show of naval force, rather than its application, that has proved most ...”

“... was clear for the confiscation of land throughout the country. There was a particular plan for the North. In 1610 the English and Scots Privy Councils started the Plantation of Ulster, an arrangement by which settlers were established on the best land in the northern counties of Ireland. These settlers – or ‘undertakers’, as they were called – started ...”