“... Statesman already existed in India. (It still does, and those who have been inclined to bemoan the London magazine’s fate might reflect that there are worse ones. In recent years its Indian namesake, under the editorship of an Oxford-educated former Trotskyist, has become a cheerleader for the Hindu supremacist, ultra-right BJP.) The New Statesman’s ...”

“... and the ‘settler’ countries of Africa began to see him in their dreams. I have met women in London and Cape Town, Berlin and Los Angeles, who talked about this haunting. Sometimes he was a black priapic bogeyman; more often, he was a dark and reproachful presence who inspired unbearable guilt and terror. It seemed not to matter whether the dreamer was a ...”

“... In 1989, I was invited to a party in London. I was a graduate student at Oxford, supposedly writing a dissertation on D.H. Lawrence but actually doing nothing of the sort. Instead, I’d completed a short novel; an extract from it had appeared in this paper, as had a poem and a review. It was on the basis of these that I must have been invited that night to the party, which was a celebration of the London Review of Books’s tenth anniversary ...”

“... from first to last, is to demonise its subject. The young Cromwell was ‘an opportunistic jack-the-lad, a ruffian on the make’. Possessed of a ‘remarkable gift of low animal cunning’ and a ‘capacity for raw deceit’, the mature statesman was ‘ambitious and totally corrupt’; quite properly, ‘the most hated man in the kingdom’, not ...”

“... almost all the colonies, protectorates and overseas dependencies that had been under the Union Jack. The confluence between colonialism and immigration – the theme of Patel’s book – was initially a joining of two currents of displacement. The first was the torrent of British emigrants moving to the empire. A 1901 survey found that nearly three ...”

“... rare book collections served those with more specialised needs.New York couldn’t compete with London or Paris: it had no bouquinistes, no Farringdon Road, no British Library or Bibliothèque nationale de France. It lacked the quaint bookshops of Boston, where the staff seemed to know not only the books they sold but their 18th and 19th-century ...”

“... it was part of a Roman burial ground, an unclean extremity lying beyond the walls of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century after bricks began to be manufactured here, John Stow described its buildings as ‘filthy cottages’. Since then, the area, whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, Banglatown, has been a byword for ...”

“... few publications that directly developed or refined the notion of the 17th-century crisis. In 1991 Jack Goldstone’s Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World sought to subsume the idea into a far larger pattern of cyclical unrest and rebellion, whose most significant determinant was population expansion and its pressures. By the later 1990s it was ...”

“... in lost export earnings, but this was trifling compared to the symbolic impact of a decision by Jack Welch, Chief Executive of the General Electric Corporation, to postpone a long-planned business trip. After all, US companies have invested more in India in the last two years than in all the previous forty. Addressing a meeting of financiers in ...”

“... Floor, the first novel in a multimillion-selling series with a notionally all-American hero, Jack Reacher. Reacher – no one in the books feels able to use his first name – hasn’t changed much since then. He’s got, if anything, more efficient and invulnerable, and he no longer passes dull moments by recalling blues recordings in high fidelity. In ...”

“... North. ‘Here are some things Charlie said were in short supply.’ The girl (Sissy Spacek) fixes Jack Lemmon with a pitying look. ‘Not any more,’ she says. The scarcities, like everything else, were politically conditioned.In one way, this strangulation of Chilean democracy was a jewel in the crown of those successful Washington-inspired military coups ...”

“... Wanstead and New Hall in Essex, Burley-on-the-Hill, Wallingford House and Chelsea House in London, as well as York House on the Strand, which he bought from Bacon. Buckingham renovated his homes at great expense and shared them with his wife, the heiress Lady Katherine Manners, daughter of the earl of Rutland. They had four children, three of whom ...”

“... on the bus too, and the man at the wheel was Neal Cassady, the legendary long-distance driver of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Stone was part of the Perry Lane crowd, but when the hijinks began to eat into his writing time he slipped away. Kesey’s voyage east with the Merry Pranksters was one of the signature moments of the decade, along with Altamont and ...”

“... Much to my surprise, Althusser got in touch with me and suggested that he should come to London and speak to my seminar. This he did. In the course of the seminar, he was asked why it was that he had not attacked the leadership of the Party in such an open and direct way before. Why had he not spoken out earlier (a reproach which Elleinstein was also ...”

“... Macleod distinguished himself by avoiding his colleagues’ ponderous circumlocutions. ‘Look, Jack,’ he said, ‘the basic question is: “Did you fuck her?” ’ Sadly, Profumo continued to try to lie his way out with mealy-mouthed statements about there being ‘no impropriety’. Wondrously, the Tory elders accepted this. Perhaps they thought ...”