“... Fitzgerald’s ardour; he believed that was how a young man of talent should feel. The Great War soon parted and changed them. Wilson went to France to work in a military hospital close to Verdun, where he learned to line up bodies on the floor as casually as he had once arranged books on a shelf. Fitzgerald never got to the ...”

“... in itself. The late Stuart Burge, the theatre director, was hidden here as an escaped POW in the war, which I took to mean he spent this perilous time in the bosom of the family. Stuart always played this down and now I can see why, as he may well have been lodged in some attic or vestibule of this vast complex, never setting eyes on the Doria-Pamphilj ...”

“... shot dead as a traitor to Islam. Already a partial wreck, Pakistan could be destroyed by a civil war. The terrorists who carried out the killings in the US were not bearded illiterates from the mountain villages of Afghanistan. They were educated, middle-class professionals from Egypt and the Hijaz province of Saudi ...”

“... Progress and The Rights of Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th. Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of Elstow, a village near ...”

“... are ‘not mature enough to tell it like it is’. But avoiding a nuclear exchange during the Cold War was simple compared to negotiating climate change. Between them, oil, gas and coal providers, governments, armies on a permanent war footing, pension funds, health services, even individual consumers have devastating ...”

“... a mixture. Its large semi-detached villas had originally been built to house the Victorian middle class, then it had gone down in the world, and though it had never entirely decayed, many of the villas degenerated into rooming-houses and so were among the earliest candidates for what is now called ‘gentrification’, but which was then called ‘knocking ...”

“... leadership’. There was a time when this meant leading by example, but since the Second World War, the phrase ‘global leadership’ has served as a euphemism for military intervention – multilateral if possible, unilateral if necessary. Indeed, exceptionalism has proved a durable justification for unilateralism. Presidential candidates from both ...”

“... came Marconi, which showed, according to Oddie, that it was largely ‘Jews of a particular class that he disliked; that is, rich Jews who might be accused … of cupidity’.The Chestertonians’ appeal eventually resulted in a six-year investigation by the diocese of Northampton into whether there was sufficient evidence of Chesterton’s ‘heroic ...”

“... for violence. Europe had seen its fair share of wars, but had never seen anything like the Civil War: mutual slaughter on an industrial scale. It got its own version in 1914: a European civil war to rival the American one. At least that’s what it was until the Americans joined, at which point it became a world ...”

“... father and mother worked their way up in the world ‘into what might be called the lower middle class’ by sheer hard work and resolved at whatever cost to themselves to provide their children with a decent education. Alexander was accordingly put into the kindergarten department of a public school (Scottish sense), where he received rapid preferment ...”

“... remote, panoptic eyeIs tracking us and quietly waiting forThe gesture that could culminate in war;You scratch your nose, I finish my ice-creamAnd screw the silver paper in the sand.Your milky skin is tanning like a dream.That ultra-violet shadow is my hand.The camera rolls on, its frozen lensPicks out the agriculture of the FensThen swaps the filters for ...”

“... become extinct, that of the self-made scientist. He grew up in a shabby-genteel lower-middle-class family in Coventry, a family whose straitened circumstances forced him to leave school and earn a living as soon as possible. Aged thirteen, he became a medical apprentice to his brother-in-law in London, a dogsbody role in what was at that time not always ...”

“... for Bleuler it was a group. How come, at exactly the same time, but separated by an ocean and a war, we get two very similar, absolutely new childhood disorders? Not so surprising. Asperger, a generation younger than Kanner, had trained under August Homburger, the author of one of Kanner’s main German textbooks, who wrote about childhood schizophrenia and ...”

“... in the wilderness came up dry. So did surveys conducted elsewhere in the Sinai. After the 1967 war, when Israeli archeologists gained access to the West Bank, the heartland of ancient Israelite culture, they expected to find the rich cities of the Book of Joshua. But instead they found evidence only of a society impoverished by centuries of Egyptian ...”

“... known as Chicklit, those pink-liveried multi-platformed entertainments in which young middle-class women seek love and fortune in the big, big city – the dreamworld of Melissa Bank (a Moore follower if ever there was one) and Sex and the City and Bridget Jones. Except that Self-Help also now reads like a self-consciously historical document, a John Dos ...”