“... charm of Lenya, on stage and off. She was born Karoline Charlotte Blamauer, in a working-class district of Vienna, to a long-suffering battered mother and a father who resented the death of his first child (who had also been called Karoline). Lenya – her first name was developed out of a Viennese diminutive of her first name – was allegedly a ...”

“... her other passing assertions, such as the allusions to ‘falling Zeppelins’ in the First World War, or to the ‘diesel Saabs’ of present-day yuppies. Who is Dora, anyway? We are invited to think of her both as typing away in the attic of 49 Bard Road with filing-cabinet, card index and word-processor, and as a gin-sodden hag pouring out her story to ...”

“... public meetings were worthy of Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign. Although the Falklands War brought this period of euphoria to a close, morale in the Alliance remained high. It was against such inflated expectations that the result of the 1983 General Election was judged. With 25.4 per cent of the vote in the United Kingdom compared to Labour’s ...”

“... They live in a society where literature, art and music are available in abundance ... in which the class barriers that once strangled social mobility are gone. Mr Major’s property-owning democracy, it turns out, is crammed, not just with cars and videos, but with works of literature and paintings too. Mrs Thatcher’s vision of homes fit for Tories ...”

“... an altogether more serious view of the Swedes. They had a big bank behind them; they had first-class London advisers; and they had good reason to pay a hefty premium for a foothold in the EC in advance of 1992. We knew that £5.20 would only be a sighting shot, and that however vigorous our defence we might have to consider seriously the level of price at ...”

“... young men at Oxford were reported to light their cigars with five-pound notes. During the last war, American officers in London nightclubs were also said to favour this method, and more recently, in various underdeveloped countries, we are told that the wealthy have been seen to impress the indigenous poor by this same eccentric display of contempt for the ...”

“... and live in the way that ‘we’ do. Salmond rightly tells us much about the disease, poverty, war, brutality and class conflict that existed in Early Modern European culture; and the point is not that these characteristics were probably absent in pre-contact Polynesia, but that we cannot escape reading them as judgments ...”

“... rule imposed by the Germans after 1907 and taken over by the Belgians in 1919. The ‘ruling class’ required by the doctrine of indirect rule had of course to be the Tutsi. As cattle-chiefs and lineage headmen their spokesmen were already accustomed to thinking of themselves as superior to the Hutu. But the needs of indirect rule transformed an ...”

“... accountants. As Italy struggles to emerge from its deepest recession since the Second World War, almost the only film in production on the Rome back-lots is a spoof of Jurassic Park. To its backers, the chief attraction of this remake is that the species to be reconstituted from primeval amber is the relatively unexotic chicken. Outside the ...”

“... had undertaken the task neglected for so long by Englishmen, found the papers after the end of the war in a state of decomposition and disintegration. He had to piece together charred, torn and rotting fragments. Much has gone beyond recall. But the first volume of a major work shared by him and Professor McClelland is promised, to be finished in ...”

“... parallel suggested by Frame’s description of analysis as a form of creative writing class), or even his thoughts on cultures in Moses and Monotheism: a society needs victims before it can have a literature. The process of becoming a writer is thus a more fundamental subject of the autobiography than the experiences Frame had in ...”

“... There is Mr Kendal’s passion for acting, and there is India, to which he first went during the war, at the age of 30, with his actress wife Laura to work for ENSA, and where he spent most of the next thirty years, bringing his daughters Jennifer and Felicity into the company he formed. In 1985, after the tragic death of Jennifer – married to the Indian ...”

“... hollow men, the inhabitants of death’s dream kingdom, are not a doomed generation or a special class of poètes maudits – they are simply unredeemed humanity; their lovelessness is merely the human condition unirradiated by grace. The lost love (la figlia che piange, hyacinth girl) of the earlier poems, who never showed any very powerful symptoms of ...”

“... to a plump dealer in smuggled tribal art who purred smoothly over the elegance of a cannibals’ war club, and he meditates at length on the demand for Sung dynasty spitoons and Meissen bedpans. In his discussion of the altered environment of religious art Alsop gives us a previously unpublished quatrain by Dorothy Parker on a picture given by William ...”

“... add up to something incontestably grand, the nearest we have today to the great cycles of upper-class English life published in the decades after the war – Dance to the Music of Time or Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour. They combine a distinctive and exotic subject – appalling posh people – with a universal ...”