“... to remove him from the reactionaries in Berlin that Wilhelm was sent briefly to study at a middle-class Gymnasium in Kassel. There he established a warm friendship with a Jewish classmate, Siegfried Sommer (the great-grandfather of Ben Elton), and initially responded well to his new surroundings. Soon, however, Wilhelm found the tough academic regime ...”

“... think defence of either was necessarily a good thing or even possible, and the threat of nuclear war confirmed her dry sense of doom. In The Birds, an undermining of yet another ancestral work, An Englishman’s Home (1909) by Guy du Maurier, Daphne rewrote her uncle’s patriotic script, gutting it of the heroics in the face of an alien, inhuman invasion ...”

“... and campaigners until it became – as it is today – practically uncontested by the political class. The widespread recognition that the English/ British ‘constitution’ is uniquely archaic and authoritarian, that this archaism derives from the incomplete English Revolution of the 17th century which merely transferred absolutism from Monarch to ...”

“... forgave her for a clearly recognisable account of them as a foolishly doting husband with a lower-class wife. Wilde didn’t speak to her again for ten years after finding himself described as fat-cheeked and elephantine, ‘scattering epigrams of not remarkably brilliant wit’. Despite the chilly reception given to Miss Brown, Lee went on putting friends ...”

“... ten best novels in the world’. Maugham’s choices were neither surprising nor controversial (War and Peace, Madame Bovary, Moby-Dick) but in a note that accompanied his list, he suggested that ‘the wise reader’ will ‘get the greatest enjoyment out of reading them if he learns the useful art of skipping’. Skip, then, to the moment when the ...”

“... boots, and their irresponsible behaviour was badly received. Fleming takes up the story: ‘The class-ridden British sneered at each other. The Europeans took a more egalitarian view: all Britons were equally awful. It wasn’t so much their clothes and their accents as their manners … [They] were known as “Yes and No Tourists”, from their refusal to ...”

“... White attended and wrote about in Frost in May. Vicious nuns, a minimal education for middle-class marriage and – something, at least – a powerful enemy to kick against. As an adult she would spit on the street if she saw nuns. Earlier, she had a more sophisticated mode of expression. ‘I’m so bored I wish I’d been birth-controlled so as not to ...”

“... the Sublime, a victim of the need for a large, empty metaphor to redeem the disaster of the Boer War and to serve for the catastrophe to come. All sides maintain that he was a man of his time: for better he’s a hero, for worse he’s an incompetent villain, for the relativist he was what he could only be and no political or moral judgment applies. Scott ...”

“... most exquisite fantasies Hollywood would ever mount, and made a sensation of Bacall. It’s in the class of an Astaire musical. ‘Slim’ in the film was wearing clothes based on the ones Slim wore in life, and ‘Steve’, her name for Harry in the film, was what the real Slim called Howard. There was a coy home movie playing out within the melodrama on ...”

“... but an objective criterion: these days it is what the right-wing press says ‘works’. The war on drugs doesn’t work; nor does building more prisons; nor, one suspects, will many of the anti-terror laws. But that doesn’t stop ministers from pursuing all of them vigorously. New Labour in practice is much more wedded to what-works politics than the ...”

“... the shifting military strategies and dynastic disputes of the Roman Empire for a generation. The war-weary Goths were after money. ‘Far from being a bloodbath,’ Brown writes, ‘the Visigothic sack of Rome was a chillingly well-conducted act of spoliation.’ Many grandees, their mansions shattered and looted, abandoned the no longer Eternal City and ...”

“... as Monsieur Hulot in ‘Les Vacances de M. Hulot’ (1953). In the decades after the Second World War, another supremely accomplished mime artist with a lively sense of the possibilities of film emerged as a plausible successor to the Tramp. Jacques Tati, born in 1907 and raised in one of Paris’s grandest suburbs, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, had by then broken ...”

“... they were drinking too much, and drove everyone home safely. He was captain of the tennis team and class president. He was handsome, had a boisterous and occasionally bawdy sense of humour (Hunter gives no evidence of this, but Obama also testified to it in his eulogy), and liked the Grateful Dead and REM. He once confessed a wish to be a ...”

“... from the main road by a knee-high wall from which the railings had been removed during the war. Here William’s green-fingered wife, Hetta, had made a verdant brief oasis of multi-coloured shrubbery: japonica, Japanese tree peony, clematis, forsythia, almond blossom, euphorbia, a rustic arch of rambling roses, all manner of bulbs, and a dwarf oak cut ...”

“... A New World Trilogy (1973) satirises the continuing attachment of the West Indian middle class to the European religious and social legacy, suggesting West African – and in particular Akan – culture as a preferable alternative. Walcott wouldn’t deny his African or his European ancestry: but, having been born and brought up in St Lucia, and ...”