“... out. Far too few ever penetrate north of Watford Junction. Far too many join the service far too young, and spend their entire lives as non-celibate monks, sheltered from the stresses and strains of the world outside. But these ills have nothing to do with the ‘cult of the generalist’, and still less with the educational backgrounds of Civil Service ...”

“... What are we meant to make of this? That it was a despicable way to behave? Buettner, herself a young American historian, ends her book with an appeal for Britain’s imperial status to become ‘a subject for analysis and debate’ in this country – rather patronising advice for a nation which has been analysing and debating it at least since A Passage ...”

“... Prussia of today has no history.’ It is all the more surprising when that writer is the young Theodor Fontane, whose later travel writings and novels would combine sharp criticisms of the Prussian present with a melancholy, elegiac fondness for the Prussian past. Pinning down what Fontane meant takes us to the heart of Christopher Clark’s lively ...”

“... of Craig’s state of mind: ‘It was good to escape from Florence where Anna Lark, his young secretary, had given birth to a son (his son).’ It isn’t hard to see his point. His treatment of Craig’s sister, Edith, is less fair. Edy ‘braced up’ her scaredy-cat younger brother when they were children by bashing him on the head and exhorting ...”

“... towards each other. Christopher Tietjens goes for a walk in the country with Valentine Wannop, the young woman for whom, at some point between volumes three and four, he will eventually leave his wife. The path down which they have wandered ends at a stile, with a road beyond. Tietjens, a man of encyclopedic knowledge and almost sublime ...”

“... from the broadcast of a documentary after the father had been convicted of indecency involving young boys, Lord Justice Hoffman said that if freedom of expression limited itself to what judges thought was responsible comment, it would be no freedom at all. He said that, in law, ‘there is no question of balancing freedom of speech against other ...”

“... men aligning the brilliant trims; the shades along the last street and at its head a small young brick apartment, its first floor occupied; the row of dark peaked shingles which across a little park faces the declining sun and the bare land with the look: ‘somehow we have not been very successful in life’; and this park itself, brand-new, a ...”

“... you going to need to scream? After forty years, the writing is as good as ever, and the distraught young woman of the 1960s is older, but still here. So we can have the lovely sentences, but we have to take the bitter medicine, too. It’s like eating chocolate parfait and bacon (the first thing Treat Morrison notices about Elena McMahon in The Last Thing He ...”

“... that draw on the Bible. Joseph Heller’s God Knows sets itself up as the memoir of the ageing David – ‘warrior king, the sweet psalmist of Israel’ – and plays off its contemporary idiom against an ancient story for cheap laughs. David reminisces without ever losing a sense of his audience; with a wink to the ...”

“... Greek and Roman Rulers’.This in itself was not necessarily big news. The Swedish diplomat Johann David Åkerblad had already correctly deduced the signs for P and T in the hieroglyphic version of Ptolemy, suggesting that the lion stood for LO; the next, which looks like the front of a Eurostar train, for M; while in 1819 the British polymath Thomas ...”

“... now is simply an observation of the kind of times we live in and how attitudes develop among our young people. Over the last weekend I saw a movie – I don’t see too many movies but I try to see them on weekends when I am at the Western White House or in Florida – and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was ...”

“... gratifying that people die while watching it, round and round for ever, in an endless loop. David Foster Wallace always had trouble finishing his novels. And yet he put in this one a thought so absorbing and delightful that you could easily imagine yourself, like the rat in the experiment, pressing the lever over and over. ‘Thousands of times an ...”

“... and cities, supporting 1400 projects, far more than any other country in Europe. According to David Mackay, a former officer in the Parachute Regiment who was project manager of the Glasgow CityWatch CCTV system for two years, ‘so positive has central government support been that, by 1997, the bulk of Home Office expenditure on crime prevention was ...”

“... is a theme that informs the whole book. In an autobiographical opening, Keegan evokes a bolshie young student killing time in a loaned Manhattan apartment, who found among the stock of records there The War Speeches of Winston Churchill. ‘The effect was electrifying.’ As he listened to the orations of 1940, with their artful changes of tempo and their ...”

“... Bathurst every week or so. He told her about his father, Gerwyn, who, no matter how hard the young Bert worked, always worked him harder. About his son, David: ‘No idea about farming (“heart’s not in it”), no idea about land (“stupid notions”), no idea about looking after animals (“up too ...”