“... than in the USA or Russia.’ Noel Annan gave his study of the intellectuals who shaped postwar Britain the title Our Age, but 1945-79 has also been called ‘the Age of Asa’ – the title of a collection of essays edited by Miles Taylor. Briggs became a dominating voice in the Wilson and Callaghan years of Labour government, a time not only of the ...”

“... a degree thinking, the same kind of thoughts as the politicians who are likely to appoint you.’ Ian Blair, Met commissioner between 2005 and 2008, wrote in his memoirs that politicians want the police to be ‘street butlers’, called on ‘when required and invisible the rest of the time’. The commissioner is accountable to both the mayor of London and ...”

“... Alexander Cockburn​ blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.’ As adjutant to Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941 ...”

“... side. From the prospectus, it looks very much as if the multi-volume History of the Book in Britain which Cambridge University Press have commissioned (under the general editorship of McKenzie and Ian Willison) will follow the Darnton model in its main outline and may indeed have been inspired by it.* Darnton has ...”

“... his company’s image as non-racist, pro-African and hostile to the illegal Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith. He lit upon Duncan Sandys, a slow-witted, racist, pro-Rhodesian right-wing Tory MP, described by another director as ‘bent ever since he was a lower boy at Eton’. Sandys was interested in chairing Lonrho for one reason only: the remuneration. He ...”

“... Lords amended the Education Reform Bill out of recognition last spring. He could now pretend to be Ian MacGregor to Diana Warwick’s Arthur Scargill. What he did was to withhold £67m earmarked for our last salary increase, even though all the conditions attached to that have been met. The mere triviality of the sum illustrates where universities stand in the ...”

“... this would mean proportionately 100,000 dead in France, 150,000 in the new Germany, and in Great Britain close to 120,000 dead. The newsfilm of funerals, grieving relatives, the details of killings and woundings that surface casually in conversation all form part of the – would the term be? – discourse of this holiday. In a damp bar just across the ...”

“... humour but ignoring almost everything else: The dominant school of fiction, still more so in Britain than in the States, remains character-driven and narrative-ratcheted, and whatever the changing nature of its cast and content – the underclass of Irvine Welsh, the denizens of Rushdie’s fables and those of other postcolonial Booker shoo-ins – it ...”

“... Tricks is a selection from his prolific writings as an essayist and reviewer. It is not unusual in Britain for a historian to win fame and fortune as a biographer: Pimlott’s achievement was to make the lives of Hugh Dalton and Harold Wilson – two Labour politicians with flawed personalities and flyblown reputations – into the stuff of compelling ...”

“... or two I actually imagined I could be responsible for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed underfoot, all the way back to Essex, through ...”

“... and admiring detail, the product of Roosevelt’s vision of a postwar world in which the USSR and Britain would retain delimited spheres of influence within an international order whose overarching power would be the United States. Its founding conference at San Francisco was meticulously controlled and choreographed by Washington, a special unit of US ...”

“... the heart of British politics, so as to entrench the idea that there are entire communities around Britain crawling with feckless, delinquent, violent and sexually debauched no-hopers. Middle England on the one hand and the chavs on the other.’ This was ‘taken to its logical conclusion’, he claimed, by the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange, in a ...”

“... Out of the Shelter (1970) recorded the encounter with ‘abroad’ after growing up in austerity Britain. Even Changing Places, still his funniest book and the one that made him famous, clearly reworked his own experience of going, as a lecturer in English at Birmingham, to be a visiting academic at Berkeley. And he has never hesitated to report directly on ...”

“... cause to resort to arms, and always found the arguments to justify it. It is not so long ago that Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, invited the media to a night-time parade of hundreds of his supporters as they waved their gun licences and threatened, in the name of democracy and the Protestant people, to use their weapons if ...”

“... that the two places where truly destabilising populist politics have been let off the leash are Britain and the United States. Looking at what we have allowed to happen, Trump must be licking his lips. Under winner-take-all systems, people who are happy to gamble away their nation’s security only have to get lucky once. Let’s hope it is only once.Neal ...”