“... and again that men like Sir John Hawkwood infested Europe in the wake of the Hundred Years’ War. Whenever England and France patched up a peace, the mercenaries suddenly found themselves without pay and with nothing to do. No wonder everyone, from the Pope down, breathed a sigh of relief when they were invited to go off and deploy their skills in North ...”

“... Stefan Meyer, the head of the Vienna Radium Institute, even when the outbreak of the First World War had made him technically an enemy. In 1921, when the survival of Meyer’s Institute was threatened by runaway inflation, Rutherford saved it by getting the Royal Society to pay Meyer £500 for radium loaned to his Manchester laboratory before the ...”

“... Tom up. He now knows he is Jewish. He will wear the Star of David, like that on his Uncle John’s war grave, he will learn Hebrew and support the state of Israel. Tom has, at last, got a general idea, a myth, into his pragmatic head – a tribal and political idea to warm up his bleak sense of duty. Tom is more interested in his Jewishness than in the other ...”

“... and Mussolini rather than with anything which stank of Communism. Surprisingly quickly, after the war, the enemy changed. Suddenly Germany and Italy were allies; Russia and Eastern Europe enemies. In the security services, the balance of power changed too. The old reactionaries came out of their caves, dusted themselves off and set out in hot pursuit of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dance and a few songs at the piano, exploited Coward’s theatrical past. Even in the Second World War, when he hoped his writing talent could be put to some serious use, it was his presence that was valued. ‘Go and sing to them while the guns are firing – that’s your job,’ Churchill told him. Coward’s massive output (60 produced plays, over three ...”

“... and the Cabinet earlier in 1949. What gave additional urgency to the issue was the Korean War in June 1950 and the Cabinet’s subsequent decisions, on two occasions, to increase and to increase again the UK’s defence programme. The major over-spending department was the Ministry of Health and, in particular, the recently-established National Health ...”

“... churned out economic fictions like one thousand billion mark bills. The communal latrines of World War One were part of a ‘renunciation of personality’ which crops up in all kinds of modern artistic manifestos. The war itself ‘redesigned the human body’, and thus has affinities with Cubism. If anything can mean ...”

“... outside Chicago. At the same time, in the ‘prairie’ houses, he creates a style for middle-class living which still strongly influences the American idea of a suburban house. Act Two begins when he leaves his family for Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a client, and, pursued by Oak Park’s disapproval, escapes abroad. In Berlin he oversees the ...”

“... to be ‘mighty merry’. He could have fled to Oxford with the Court, but there was a war on and somebody had to run the Navy. It would seem to have been a season when servant girls were best left untumbled, but Pepys never lets up, perhaps driven by the knowledge that ‘a man cannot depend on living two days to an end.’ He tells the tale of ...”

“... Roth has created the ultimate assimilated Jew. Swede Levov is proudly, even triumphantly middle-class: he was a star athlete in high school, a marine right after college; he married Miss New Jersey and took over his father’s glove factory; his nickname reflects the fact that he even looks like a goy, blond, blue-eyed, and gifted with a ...”

“... literature, politics and the relations between the sexes – a hopefulness not yet blighted by the war raging in Europe. Aspiring geniuses were not dying in the trenches, nor were they starving in garrets: apartments were still cheap in the Village and work was easy to find (even though for a time Burke lived on oatmeal and milk). The radical intelligentsia ...”

“... and a ‘windbag’; Andrew Noble tags him ‘the clay-footed prophet of the British-Scots middle-class’. In some respects, Wilson deserves all he gets. As an academic he was a charlatan; as a critic a coward and a bully. He was a forgettable poet and a bad novelist. On the other hand, he wrote the neglected masterpiece of Scottish Romanticism. The Noctes ...”