“... church, but I would still be I, Richard Verey, 35 years old, an Englishman of the upper middle class’; or, now, Richard Fisher, historian, writer and observer by temperament, drawn into the dirty world of action at the crisis of the Cold War, in divided Germany in 1983. If knowledge is one way of testing the limits of ...”

“... December last year between the President of the country and the RUF leader, and the five-year-old war was ended. If this accord continues to hold, as at present, it will be because ‘the system’ of utterly corrupt ‘clientage’, or ‘patrimonialism’ in Richards’s preferred usage, will have ceased to wield an all-compelling power and will have given ...”

“... wings to fly. Although the record is treacherous, it will be endlessly quarried for examples of class attitudes, popular prejudices, sexual mores, ghastly manners, period slang (blissikins, blissipots), evidence of anti-semitism, sidelights on the servant problem, glimpses of the literary underworld and aspects of life under the Attlee Terror. Even in its ...”

“... Birds, which the ornithologist and publisher H. F. Witherby conceived just before the First World War, brought out in the Twenties, and replaced in the Thirties with a five-volume Handbook, the emphasis was on Plumages, Bare Parts, Moults, Measurements, Weights, Structure and Geographical Variation. Witherby’s stylish volumes marked the transition from ...”

“... would be required by our moral guardians. W.H. Smith have sections devoted to Horror, Romance, War, Teen Fiction and Science Fiction – but Westerns, as the cowpoke would put it, are scarcer than hen’s teeth. Cultural prejudice against the genre extends to the medium which it has made peculiarly its own. It has been reckoned that 90 per cent of American ...”

“... Office rated it as a tropical posting and, until the advent of air-conditioning, the political class had evacuated the former swamp between June and September. In her readable, if modular, account of how air-conditioning in the United States evolved from a novelty to a luxury, to a necessity, to a right, Marsha Ackermann devotes a chapter to cooling creep ...”

“... a stop to this; and neither could their parents or anybody else. This was in the solidly middle-class south County Dublin suburbs in the early 1960s, now regarded as the dawn of a less insular Ireland – a time and a place of which one might have expected better. Hamilton is too resourceful and alert a writer to make his memoir yet one more book about a ...”

“... turbines, have fled Baghdad for fear of being kidnapped. The walls of al-Iskan, the lower-middle-class district where Musak lives, are covered in slogans supporting the resistance. Musak explained: ‘A few weeks ago a man, nobody knows who, shot at a helicopter with his Kalashnikov. The helicopter fired two rockets in return. They hit the tent where a ...”

“... imposed way of behaviour,’ their grandson Rhodri recalled. ‘“We’re both very nice middle-class artists, and I’m a vicar.” It was impossible to be relaxed about them, they weren’t normal, they wouldn’t allow themselves to be relaxed. So there were these huge silences . . . But small talk was vulgar. And a lot of life is vulgar.’ Parish ...”

“... and anti-nuclear, and he hoped to draw attention to Wilson’s support for America’s war in Vietnam. He didn’t expect to win the seat, but if he could get a thousand votes from Labour, Hull North might return to the Tories, precipitating a general election. Gott was confident that Labour would win that election, but believed that afterwards the ...”

“... but it may also be significant that this will be its fifth prime minister since the start of the war in Ukraine. As Britain becomes less politically predictable, there are murmurs that bond investors are adding a risk premium to the cost of debt, since it is no longer clear who will be in charge of the country from one year to the next, or how disciplined ...”

“... way into the navy by offering the government the use of his family’s boat during the First World War. As Lloyd Steven Sieden explains in his 1989 biography, the navy formed Fuller’s intellectual ideals. Ever after, he aspired to be as comprehensively informed and autonomous as a ship’s captain in the age before radio, when there was no higher authority ...”

“... War was looming when Alexander Korda’s film Fire over England was released in 1937. It stars Flora Robson as Elizabeth I, and as the opening titles roll the voiceover sets the scene: ‘the free people of a small island’ defy the tyranny of a Continental power and ‘a woman guides and inspires them.’ Robson, firm of jaw and bristling with double-decker ruffs and farthingales, outwits the dastardly Spanish and the Armada is defeated ...”

“... Sound​ is war,’ a sound tech I know likes to say. He means that when you try to extend its life, things get messy. Sound is fragile and decays quickly; when you fight that, it can become wild. Plug a bunch of instruments into amplifiers to try to get the sound of a rock and roll band to vibrate in the ears of twenty people in some dirty little club and you have trouble on your hands ...”

“... true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s possible influences on their early work. And yet, despite the eloquent advocacy of these two recently departed giants, his work remains a specialised taste. A YouTube video of him ...”