“... decision have been the subject of endless speculation. Was Vittorio Emmanuele afraid of civil war? Did he doubt the loyalty of his troops? Had he been swayed by the supposed Fascist sympathies of his mother, Queen Margherita? Or was it just that, like everyone else, he had simply read the morning papers?The revocation of martial law was announced to the ...”

“... to which Ken Tynan bore a symbolic relation was the quarter-century following the Second World War, during which the generation of grammar-school children to whom the Education Act of 1944 opened Britain’s older universities created a new society open to their talents. Tynan was the first, and flamboyantly the foremost, of their number. In fact, his ...”

“... territorial dispute, which had re-emerged unchanged after the deluge of the First World War. That quote has been much cited since by patronising commentators to signal the pettiness, self-absorption and venom of Irish feuds over the northern part of Ireland. From the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, which first partitioned Ireland, to the Northern ...”

“... that identified the malaise as a contemporary phenomenon. The lingering effects of the First World War had worked to undermine ‘the standards of civilisation’ and ‘the restraint of a traditional culture’, he told the readers of the Spectator in 1929, and the present ‘crazy and sterile generation’ was the result. His anatomy of that generation, Vile ...”

“... I am of that odious class of men called democrats,’ Wordsworth wrote to his friend William Mathews in 1794. Much the same can be said of Coleridge, on the evidence of his letters and publications of the mid-1790s. By the early decades of this century, British, French and American scholarship concurred in finding both poets to be, in the 1790s, republicans and advanced reformers, who then suffered disappointment in the course of the French Revolution and, in different ways and at different times, changed their minds ...”

“... to my own surprise (and very much to the surprise of my college) had just scraped into the first class. So instead of being thrust out into the world as I had expected I was offered the chance of putting Life off a little longer by staying on, as I thought vaguely ‘to do research’, though into what I had no idea. In quest of a supervisor and also a ...”

“... For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world ...”

“... wait a while. The plot was a double-braid: one strand was set in the 17th century during the Civil War and concerned an obsessive, self-absorbed mystic called Nicodemus; the other strand was set in the late 1950s in Sardinia and concerned a hydraulics engineer called Lucas Arnow employed by the Ford Foundation to drain the malarial swamps of the Sardinian ...”

“... century saw a series of setbacks along the perimeter of settlement: from the French and Indian War in the Ohio Valley to the Tuscarora, Yamasee and Cherokee wars in the Carolinas. In the 1760s, the British future in North America was ransomed by the Odawa charismatic Pontiac, whose forces, numbering only three thousand, seized eight forts and besieged Fort ...”

“... represented by both Jeffrey Weeks and Peter Tatchell, has viewed ‘homosexuals’ as an oppressed class, like the proletariat, produced, along with housewives, by a historically contingent bourgeois sexual system which emerged alongside modern capitalism/consumerism in the 19th century. Its focus is not ‘equal rights for gay people’ so much as the ...”

“... in the 1930s, was, when I arrived, just disappearing into the altered circumstances of the war. Similarly with Cambridge English. What Basil Willey, supported by Muriel Bradbrook and others, has called its Heroic or Golden Age ran from 1928 to somewhere in the 1930s. Tillyard saw loss or decline from about 1930. F.R. Leavis, in 1943, offered a sketch ...”

“... so perhaps I’m now tweeness’s accepted measure. 28 September. At the outset of the Iraq war Tony Blair was determined not to be another Chamberlain. Now as he slowly prepares to leave office one can see that Chamberlain is exactly who he has come to resemble. In the 1930s Chamberlain put through some enlightened social legislation, but all anyone ...”

“... been casualties of the imprisonment here of Scottish prisoners during the aftermath of the Civil War. The new notes in the cathedral’s leaflet now specifically disavow this without at the same time explaining how such radical mutilation occurred. This is somewhat mealy-mouthed, and rather than the fruits of some breakthrough study of the circumstances of ...”

“... majority stalemate founded on archaism in both state and civil society, like the grotesque social-class rigidities evolved in England to compensate for the slowing down and paralysis of democratic nationality. As the intolerable structure has broken down since the Second World War, peripheral discontent has grown and taken ...”

“... political anecdote – taken from Thirlwell’s reading, since he didn’t have Kundera’s Cold War experience – as a way of reflecting on his characters and their behaviour. The voice is friendly yet domineering. No sooner is a character or event introduced than the writer steps forward to control the reader’s response: ‘I think you are going to like ...”