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“... an indication of how the party’s changing, Wilfred got selected for Chippenham – white, middle-class, you know, deepest Wiltshire. And Wilfred tooled up to the selection meeting, wearing his jeans and an open-necked shirt, and just took them by storm. And they love him.’ ‘Do you want to meet Wilfred?’ the press officer said. ‘Yeah, you should ...”

“... or places of higher education. And here is Bruce’s open scholarship to Exeter in 1922, his first-class degree three years later; his Senior Demyship at Magdalen in 1925 and the Bryce Studentship; then, in 1926, a fellowship at Magdalen. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t figure in any of the team photographs that line the corridors.A woman is restoring some of the ...”

“... prominence, not only because it provided a simple picture of the dangers of a post-Cold War world, but because he wrote of ethnic hatred and religious intolerance without the usual liberal discomfort, indeed without appearing to make value-judgments of any sort. This new book is an elaboration of that article and a response to its critics. Dazzling ...”

“... the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned on its own grave.’ In this splendid pre-war novel we meet Thomas Quayne, a successful businessman, and his smart wife Anna, both in their thirties: very comfortable, three servants, one char, no children, living in a moderately elegant house, though not a Nash house, on the Outer Circle of Regent’s ...”

“... Coal was delivered by horse and cart, as was milk, and when I was evacuated during the war – though I find this hard to believe now – I went to Ripon market by horse and cart. On the other hand, I have never been to a horse-race. Stubbs was born and brought up in Liverpool, then moved to York, and then beyond York to an area even more remote ...”

“... China in the ten years between its conquest of power and 1958, and had left the chaos of the civil war and late Republican China behind. The first two five-year plans had achieved high levels of growth in industry and agriculture and the Chinese had fought the United States to a standstill in Korea. For the elite, then, the success of the Revolution, of ...”

“... patients, like Brandt, were German. The spread of TB was one of the legacies of the First World War. As Paul Delany tells us, in Germany TB sufferers doubled in number in the last two years of the war, when ‘soap disappeared completely, and the streetcars were foul with the distinctive stench of famine.’ Rolf ...”

“... reports, ‘James began to form friendships of a more significant kind – with members of his own class, the writers and artists of London.’ There was something in the air of the early 1880s and he began to allow it to enter his mind, an air ‘full of events, of changes, of movement (some people would say of revolution, but I don’t think that)’.When ...”

“... low salaries, growing unemployment and – since 1982 – recession, despite the recent post-war boom. With no other outlet for public discontent, a minority religious sect is broadening into a political movement. The fundamentalist foot-soldiers come from religious universities. Their leaders are a new breed of religious intellectual who, unlike the old ...”

“... It cannot, in other words, be an American value. The town’s secret is that during the war some of its inhabitants murdered a farmer of Japanese descent. The guilty parties assume that Tracy’s John Macreedy has come to investigate the crime, when his mission is much simpler: to deliver a bravery medal to the father of the man who saved his life ...”

“... three infant grandchildren for the first time’; ‘For the first time since she’d begun the class he could see unmistakably how attractive she must have been before the degeneration of an ageing spine took charge of her life.’ Where the text settles into third-person narrative and gives us direct speech, our awareness that this is the memory of a ...”

“... of A la recherche, in particular Marcel’s return to Paris, now strikingly decayed after World War One, although unlike Proust, Lampedusa provides no theory of redemptive art at the end. In his final illness and death the prince lies in a shabby Palermo hotel, exhausted by his trip back from Naples, where he had gone to see a specialist. Concetta and ...”

“... stable, propertied lives.There’s another factor swelling and enriching St Albans: the middle-class exodus from London, a twenty-minute commute away. As renting in London gets more expensive and as buying becomes hard for people who are well paid but lack inherited wealth, the city is losing more people to commuter towns and other parts of Britain than it ...”

“... treats him fairly gently; he was a Kingsman and had been Forster’s boss in Egypt during the war. Lubbock greatly admired Strether, the ‘central consciousness’ of The Ambassadors (the very book Forster chose to disparage). Forster concedes that James was devoted to his ‘aesthetic duty’, ‘but at what sacrifice! . . . Most of human life has to ...”

“... de la France’ and is evidently intended as a cry of protest against the anguish and horror of war – perhaps too evidently. Where the outer movements of En blanc et noir communicate an exhilarating effortlessness, the energy of the middle movement seems blocked, as if the music were inhibited by its own high aims. A grim procession of broken and ...”