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“... Bryan Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation (2005). Briefly, after World War Two the Edward Gibbon view of late antique history – Latin civilisation destroyed by Germanic barbarians – became thoroughly unwelcome in the new Europe, as too close to what had just happened and implying some kind of fault-line across the continent. A ...”

“... it as fanciful, but what I was writing about in Enjoy – the decay and preservation of a working-class quarter in a Northern town and the last back-to-back in Leeds – all came true much quicker than I could have imagined in the decades that followed. The same threatens to be the case with People. Privacy, or at any rate exclusivity, is increasingly for ...”

“... majors and ‘disgusting pork sausages’, anxious politeness and Tudorbethan houses, the Cold War and cathedral spires. Meades lists the chemist’s shops and dowdy hotels of Salisbury, where he grew up: the Old George Inn (‘delightful’), The Crown (with ‘a swirly carpet’, owned by a fraudster called Cyril), The White Hart, The King’s Arms ...”

“... clothes, and had the ordinary, well-washed respectable shopping and gossiping faces of working-class housewives. By the side of each woman stood a small pile of tins, and it soon became clear that it was possible to make love to any of them in this very public place by adding another tin to the pile. In time, Chatwin’s work would be cited as a polar ...”

“... Mary Wilson (whom he once used to trump the BBC’s religious broadcasting department in a turf war), Ian Fleming and John Osborne. The bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, surrounded by Arab boys, camp churchmen and Beverley Nichols, takes the credit for widening Betjeman’s horizons, leading him and Elizabeth Cavendish regularly abroad in a group that ...”

“... and other future grandees. It was, as he later remarked, ‘a ripping education’, a first-class ticket for life. The next stop was Cambridge, by means of a scholarship to Magdalene. At this optimum moment of intellectual purity he had already developed that distaste for Christianity which was to grow so bitter in later years. Meanwhile Cambridge ...”

“... Incidentally, they know you know they know you know the code.’ Peter Ustinov’s Cold War satire Romanoff and Juliet (1956) could have been about Salisbury Court, the London home in the early 1580s of the French Ambassador to the Court of Elizabeth I, Michel de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissière, an establishment described by John Bossy as ‘zany, convivial and leak-ridden ...”

“... Felicia Hemans’s reputation grew, and her work went out of print only after the First World War. Her importance in dictating the taste for patriotism, obedience and sacrifice in generations of readers cannot be underestimated. She was, after all, the author of the heroic tale of filial duty, ‘Casabianca’ (‘The boy stood on the burning ...”

“... 1945 is the template for what’s possible. But what can be achieved in the aftermath of a world war is not a template for anything, not unless Brexit turns out to be a calamity on a scale no one can possibly wish for. For the right, Thatcher’s victories in the 1980s show what can be done under a first-past-the-post system – and no doubt it was the ...”

“... inventories, some water-damaged after an incendiary bomb landed on Savile Row in the Second World War, reveal that many spent more on the state liveries worn by their servants than on themselves. One contemporary commentator observed: ‘Footmen tricked out by Poole in brimstone and ruby loafed like great golden carp in half the palace entrance halls of ...”

“... in race.When it gained independence in 1948 Burma had been devastated by the Second World War. The Raj had left a weak state, a legacy of race-based thinking, and a politics dominated by the left. Colonial rule had never really extended to the remote uplands and administration was now everywhere in tatters. Socialist ideas were in the ascendancy, and ...”

“... however, and historians have continued to bicker over the causes of the fall: over-extension, class struggle, natural disaster, or perhaps the emancipation of women? In 1984, the German scholar Alexander Demandt carefully catalogued the 210 explanations so far proposed. There have been many more since: climate change and disease are particularly high on ...”

“... countries that have proportional representation face profound challenges and politicians as a class are no more loved there than they are here. In Spain it is proving difficult to form a government at all. And if things really go wrong and the Euro project finally falls apart, PR will not save it. It isn’t a panacea. But it also isn’t a coincidence ...”

“... Seselj, who flew to The Hague several years ahead of Karadzic and is currently on trial for war crimes. The Radicals were neck and neck in the polls with Boris Tadic’s Democratic Party, which was heading an alliance with a handful of smaller parties ‘for a European Serbia’. The Radicals looked likely to score at least as well as the alliance, and ...”

“... what happened to him. In this way we devour without protest such improbable ‘facts’ as that a war galley can be capsized by a Roman catapult shooting a bag of loose stones into the belly of the sail; or that a Norman at the fireside sits with one hand on his chin, while a Saxon rests his head in both hands. In one of the earlier Indian stories, ‘The ...”