“... the imagination to ask. There were a few good students in the class, and one exceptional one. He took passive revenge on Mr Deas by becoming an accountant instead of heading for the maths faculty. Others did go on to maths and physics at university. The rest of us scraped through the exam and afterwards forgot everything we had learned. I can still add and ...”

“... and on jihadism itself. In 1990, as the anti-Saddam coalition triumphed in Kuwait, Islamists took solace from the collapse of three of the most disliked secular dictatorships in Africa: Hissène Habré in Chad in December 1990, Siad Barre in Somalia in January 1991 and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia in May 1991 (precipitating Eritrea’s ...”

“... for instance, be found impressing vagrants at its own cost into manufactories, and no industry took advantage of this subsidised but otherwise unattractive labour-force. When noblemen or merchant burgesses took off their Parliamentary robes and became potential ratepayers or employers, they could see that such ...”

“... almost overnight, his parents gave up dance and stopped playing those records and quite calmly took up other habits. Though it is said that children pass through ‘phases’, Gautam found that his parents probably passed through as many phases as he did, if not more. They were always changing, developing, growing. For instance, when Gautam had been ...”

“... story: the moment of great betrayal when Mandelson switched from Diet Pepsi to Diet Coke and took his support from Brown to Tony Blair, thus denying his former friend what Archer would doubtless call the greatest of all prizes. It says much about Mandelson’s self-confidence that he engaged energetically in the subsequent war – a campaign conducted ...”

“... in December he tried to rape his wife four times in the space of a fortnight, until the servants took to locking the door to her room. He tried to evict her from their house; and she finally fled north to her parents after he had dragged her from the drawing room in the presence of Augusta and his cousin, George Byron, quite possibly with the intention of ...”

“... place their placards in the windows of all the tenants up for removal. And in every block they took turns to watch the street. They stood with a bell. First sight of the bailiff’s officer the alarm bell would ring out the strikers’ angelus. And down the women would come from all parts of the building. ‘Some with flour, if baking, wet clothes, if ...”

“... she warned girls, was no better than lying outright. In the 1840s, less predictably, Engels took time out from The Condition of the Working Class in England to sneer at the anthologies littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie. In the 1980s, the American poet David Antin charged that ‘anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to ...”

“... impression on him. Their assignations were usually at Ward’s flat in Wimpole Mews, but once he took her to the family house where they made love in front of the television set. Whether or not Profumo was ‘sharing Christine Keeler’s favours’ with the Russian spy – the author’s guess is that lvanov did not quite make it – the ...”

“... in ideas and traducing their concepts in the process. By 1983, the centenary of the birth of both John Maynard Keynes (died 1946) and Joseph Alois Schumpeter (died 1950), it was the less dirigiste Schumpeter, so economists were saying, who spoke to the needs of the hour. The Age of Keynes thus gave way to the Age of Schumpeter, as can be confirmed by ...”

“... and easy acceptance of American limits, is often contrasted with the neocon evangelism that took off after the attacks of 9/11. Kissinger had long served as a foil for the New Right. The secretary of state ‘sounds like Churchill’ but ‘acts like Chamberlain’, Norman Podhoretz wrote in 1976. And even before conservatives came to condemn Kissinger ...”

“... reconcile themselves to the new state of affairs, but by no means all. The political scientist John Whyte pointed out that ‘for civil war to break out, it is not necessary for a majority of inhabitants to desire it.’ Small groups can carry out sectarian assassinations that provoke reprisals and counter-reprisals. Protestant paramilitary groups ...”

“... of location enabled a deep study of Islamic culture, its history and origins. Back in Paris he took charge of the Muslim section of the Bibliothèque Nationale and then taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He left the PCF after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising by Soviet tanks in 1956, but ...”

“... was ‘a little friend of ours’; for Lamb, ‘the animalcule’; Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth took to calling him Peter Quince. Even his friends tended to diminish him: ‘Poor little fellow!’ Carlyle exclaimed to his wife, Jane, who mused: ‘What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk.’ Scarcely surprising, then, that De ...”

“... nurtured at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Wall Street and other playgrounds of the Wasp elite, took badly paid jobs in government out of a spirit of noblesse oblige. In the 1960s, however, they found themselves pushed aside by the ‘professional elite’: people, often from Jewish, Irish, Italian or mixed ethnic backgrounds, who weren’t born into power ...”