“... were supposed to be able to mix easily with diplomats and foreign ministers. In 1933 the Etonian Ian Fleming – ‘his appearance is good, and his manners are agreeable’ – covered the show trials in Moscow of the Vickers engineers. ‘Moscow, Wednesday. As the famous clock on the Kremlin Tower strikes 12 the six Metropolitan-Vickers English employees ...”

“... neck and the dirty business of extracting the stones from the earth.The film takes its name from Ian Fleming’s 1956 novel, which in turn took its name from De Beers’s famously successful advertising campaign of 1947. The ads are worth seeking out: since antitrust laws prevented the cartel from doing business in the US, they couldn’t promote De Beers ...”

“... they intended in all seriousness to ship them to Madagascar. It was only the failure to invade Britain that caused them to abandon this plan sometime early in 1941. More troubling still is that when the mass killings did begin, they appeared to come out of nowhere. Historians have yet to find a document from Hitler ordering them to start. SS units that ...”

“... by Carnell), established a bimonthly schedule the following year. At last there was a platform in Britain for quality science fiction; what it now needed was a distinctively British approach.James Graham Ballard hadn’t read much science fiction during his boyhood in Shanghai’s International Settlement (he had just turned eleven when the Japanese invaded ...”

“... original had been cut by an hour and the extensive flashback structure lost. It was, as the critic Ian Christie wrote, ‘as if the film had been punished for its own revolt against the “mere tyranny” of time by having a strict and false linearity imposed’. Critics greeted the restored version as a lost masterpiece. The film never settles in form, tone ...”

“... have done something to temper Aspinall’s scorn at the degeneration of the species in the modern Britain of social welfare, and who should surely have found something to honour in the exploits of her old friend the millionaire hero of Howletts and Port Lympne, where his zoos have been located. After Oxford, Aspinall got on his bike and pedalled into ...”

“... Janet, had served as a nurse in the First World War, then returned to lose her own battle in Britain. Thirty-nine and unmarried, she became pregnant within weeks of the armistice, much to the horror of her well-off Dundee family. Neat penetrates the various legends put about by Henderson, who didn’t at all mind if people took him for the bastard son of ...”

“... are Imogen’s amateur vivisectionist stepmother and her son, the would-be rapist Cloten: ‘Britain’s a world/By itself,’ he vaunts, ‘and we will nothing pay/For wearing our own noses.’ Both are defeated over the course of the play, and its happy ending celebrates Cymbeline’s wise decision that ...”

“... era to be given a Unesco World Heritage listing. It is a commonplace that modern architecture in Britain, as an ideology, was an import from interwar Central Europe – dropped off en route to the US by Mendelsohn or Gropius, and picked up by permanent émigrés like Goldfinger, Lubetkin et al – and Ahrends’s book is a document of the way the architects ...”

“... biography, and all other forms of snobbish gossip. This is why things are as bad as they are in Britain now. There is a great deal of philistinism in the British Isles, true, and it does a great deal of harm. But in trying to construct a thesis, Kenner finds himself working back and back to find when we started sinking, and absent mindedly includes both ...”

“... of Israel, the book which appeared under Wilson’s name in 1981: ostensibly a history of ‘Britain, America and the State of Israel’, it was a weirdly one-sided polemic, whose hero was Balfour and villain Ernest Bevin, Attlee’s foreign secretary and an ogre to Zionists to this day. It was so slipshod and inaccurate that Thurston Clarke in the New ...”

“... he was advised by his doctors to take a holiday. He reluctantly agreed, spending three weeks at Ian Fleming’s somewhat spartan Jamaican hideaway, even though British troops remained on the ground in Egypt. When he returned, it soon became clear that he could not continue in office (at the 18 December meeting of the 1922 Committee Eden was forced to admit ...”

“... nobody refers to Keith Kyle as a ‘collusion theorist’ because he explodes the claim that Britain, France and Israel were not acting in concert in 1956. The term ‘organised crime’, which suggests permanent conspiracy, is necessary both to understand and to prosecute a certain culture of wrongdoing. And you may have noticed that those who are too ...”

“... comes along every century or so, but the 2013 calamity – part of a series of floods that wracked Britain that winter – was portrayed by the government and media as an outrider of man-made climate change. And yet the government response was broadly the same as in 1953: money was rushed into building new flood defences. The best – a cynic would say the ...”

“... film books (they have been publishing screenplays for some time). Since the mid-Seventies, Britain has been lamentably served in this respect, with the decline or disappearance of the main series that flourished in the Sixties, the era of Bergman, Fellini and Godard. Secker had Cinema One and Cinema Two; Lorrimer did Classic and Modern Film ...”