“... of his Stalin book. Part of the reason is that he has lately been much occupied with the ‘war’ on Islamist terrorism, and seems, publicly, to have been thinking about little else. Earlier this year, to an interviewer from the Times, he said: ‘They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 ...”

“... is any indication.) For such an aspirer at such a time, with the entire world engulfed in war, beautiful miniatures – glass menageries – were out of the question: life was to be absorbed in great gobs and gulps in lusty pursuit of masterpieces. A Marine stationed at Parris Island, South Carolina in 1945, Styron wrote to his father about the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to keep building houses during the Depression, then apartment blocks for naval bases during the war, then entire neighbourhoods – Trump Village, Shore Haven, Beach Haven – for veterans returning to Brooklyn. According to Michael D’Antonio’s delightful new biography, one of Trump père’s schemes was to create an ‘independent company to buy used ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... periods of desperate re-adjustment. He can give harrowingly vivid descriptions of the squalor that war had brought to many of the towns and cities he knew, but his accounts of governmental politics tend to be cursory. His attention is caught by people. He may not explore their minds and hearts but he sees the full surface. Back in England he soon assembled and ...”

“... Boulding has faith in the more conventional sense. Born in Liverpool before the First World War to devout working-class parents whose greatest hope was that their son would become a Methodist missionary, Boulding became instead an economist, a pacifist and a Quaker. His studies of the economics of labour unions led ...”

“... say, the rediscovery of the real crowds of the Third Republic (through analysing, perhaps, the class, gender or age of those who congregated at certain demonstrations, gathered appreciatively around Boulanger, or intervened in the Dreyfus affair), to a particular writing of the crowd – for instance, the crowd as a complex metaphor and motif stretching ...”

“... but have been affected by them’. Maybe not. And quite likely reminiscing about the Civil War would have been ‘contra-indicated’ after 1660. But people can be stubbornly resistant to mere proximity, however much scholars like to forge connections. It is striking to note, for instance – to take an example from Anne Hudson’s book – that ...”

“... for a long time to stuff the notes into the till. On other occasions the reporter flew first-class with his wife to New York for a New Year party and spent £10,000 in one day on furnishings. He spent £140,000 on restoring a yacht. He rented a gallery in central Hamburg as his personal museum. At one time or another he had been trusted with most of the ...”