“... of others and our relative well-being has nothing to do with colonialism or the IMF. Should you be told that the average life expectancy is 78.2 in Sweden and 39 in Sierra Leone, remind yourself that some cultures are cut out for success and others aren’t. Which culture you are born into is not something for which you are responsible. Neither are you ...”

“... had got going properly, ‘the autonomy of local government started to decline,’ Daunton says. By the interwar period, the institutional and social fabric that holds Britain’s cities together is fraying. New technologies of transport and power become slings for catapulting homes and industry clear of the tangled inner city. Reinforced ...”

“... of Paris’. It consisted of a colour-coded roll of parchment representing the soon-to-be Emperor’s provisional thoughts on the renovation of the capital’s thoroughfares. This was the Urtext of the drastic transformations to the material and social fabric of Paris that were to take place during most of the Second Empire (the term ...”

“... years,’ Lady Astor used to say of Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, ‘I’ve never known Philip to be wrong on foreign politics.’ Though Lothian himself thought much the same, it is, in fact, harder to think of an occasion when he was right. As Sir Robert Vansittart, the strongly anti-Nazi head of the Foreign Office in the 1930s put it, ‘Lothian was an ...”

“... Minister’s last couple of speeches that he has seriously lost his bearings. None of this should be a surprise: it was clear from the way Labour fought the last election that it would end up like this. The Government’s problem is that its operating assumptions and strategies are wholly or partly wrong; and it will have to emend them. The Government’s ...”

“... Noel Annan will be best remembered for Our Age, his grand, confident and sometimes very funny memoir written in the late 1980s, looking back at that generation of the British élite which came of age between the two world wars and so (as the book’s subtitle claimed) ‘made postwar Britain’. Here he reflected on their social connections, their shifting political and intellectual priorities, their sexual preferences, and their apparently glittering careers ...”

“... one tourist attraction, and neighbourhoods long in decline are undergoing remarkable revivals. To be sure, a few blemishes mar the renaissance: the periodic killing of unarmed black men by the police, for example, or the persistent failure of the public school system. Census statistics, moreover, reveal that nearly all the ...”

“... down the source of Aids. It is, in fact, three books rolled into one. The investigation advertised by the title is, of course, of the highest significance. It was in 1981 that attention was first drawn to the condition, as evidence mounted that gays in New York and California were falling victim to illnesses like pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and ...”

“... of treasonable design assumed life-and-death importance – the punishment for high treason was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. While other treason laws had come and gone, the 1351 statute remained the sole law defining high treason in England, and since the Act of Union it had also been the law in Scotland. The statute was generally agreed to ...”

“... in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He has always seemed the dullest of them, which may be why he has not been the subject of a substantial biography – this one is very fine and much needed – since 1932. ‘Though he is a very shrewd and industrious man he is not a star of the first brilliance,’ was one contemporary judgment. His own mother ...”

“... certain vision of London. He finds it realised in the 1987 film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, scripted by Hanif Kureishi, especially the ‘extraordinary scene’ in which the screen is divided and three attractive couples ‘are all shown fucking’. Here is cinematic confirmation of the city as a place of unpredictable pairings and joyful ...”

“... according to his first-rate biographer, Emily Leider, who has already distinguished herself by writing the definitive book on Mae West, had a ‘slightly cauliflowered’ left ear. Most photographs hide this ear, as did his protective cinematographers, so I must struggle to imagine it. If I were to write a brief memoir about my relation to Valentino or ...”

“... is thankfully oblivious of it), and after some months the chancellor pops the question. Will you be his secretary, on the understanding that he gets to sleep with you as well? He won’t leave his wife for you, he won’t destroy his career, but as the confidante and adviser of one of the government’s brightest stars, you’ll share a good slice of his ...”

“... the same assistance? Is the resulting text something like scripture? The orthodox answer would be no: the canon of scripture is closed, and the days of revelation are over. But from the middle of the 17th century onwards, people began to have problems with the idea of a closed, eternally synchronous Bible. In England, extreme radicals wrote pamphlets in ...”

“... is to see if we can somehow balance these objects, one on the other, are generally found to be annoying. Conversation falters. People wait for over ambitious configurations to collapse. Structural doodling is our way of playing at being engineers. We search for the point of balance as weight is transferred from one item to another. We load a folded card ...”