“... had one of them not found its way into Hermann Goering’s private collection. At the end of the war van Meegeren (who was traced as having dealt him the picture) was charged with collaboration, and to save himself confessed to the lesser crime of forgery. The trial took place in a courtroom lined with what had till then been considered some of Holland’s ...”

“... Ford Madox Ford novel, one would be a place, the other Head of a beastly Public School for Middle-Class Girls. Kipling was adept at parody. By writing with Tennysonian or Arnoldian grandeur about the realities of Anglo-Indian life, he dramatised not only his literary ambitions but differences of attitude between the British at home and the British in ...”

“... her unshakeable conviction of social superiority to everyone in Hanmer. In fact, her sense of what class amounted to was remarkably pure and precise, in its South Wales way. Owning a business in a community where virtually everyone else went down the pit for wages would have seemed, in her youth, thoroughly posh. And the simple fact of not working when all ...”

“... in 1933 he lived with his parents and older sister in the now famous 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in a middle-class suburb of Swansea. He had an undistinguished career at school: though he was a notoriously good actor and mimic, he was not academic. He worked on a local newspaper after leaving school but preferred to spend his time, when not obsessively writing his ...”

“... increasingly tyrannical measures to suppress radical discontent, and as England and France went to war, Wordsworth went from feeling ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/But to be young was very heaven!’ to saying that he ‘Yielded up moral questions in despair’. That mental trajectory had poetic consequences. Roe takes us through that process moment ...”

“... at home, virtual pariah status abroad. While the Western media is full of resurgent Cold War rhetoric, recent polls by the Levada Centre, one of the few independent research outfits remaining in Russia, show overwhelming support – 85 per cent – for the annexation of Crimea; they also show that in November 59 per cent thought the country was ...”

“... in the dockside streets of Bristol by thugs in the pay of his brother, conveyed aboard a man of war, HMS Ruby, and strangled with a length of ship’s rope, his cravat having proved inadequate for the job. Captain Goodere and three accomplices were hanged on St Michael’s Hill in Bristol the following April. Foote immediately scented commercial potential ...”

“... would have brought her, Colley says, ‘to within touching distance of Britain’s governing class’. But there was not much time for romance. The outbreak of the Seven Years War brought the threat of French invasion, and led to Milbourne’s hurried transfer to Gibraltar. Gibraltar was also under threat; if ...”

“... enough in the past (though still present enough for millions of people) to be treated as the Great War might be in literary novels of the 1920s or 1930s. The counterweight to Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, for instance, with her intimations of bliss and connectedness, was the psychologically ruined war veteran ...”

“... Schneider were born in 1946 and 1947 respectively, both of them into a ‘wealthy upper-middle-class background’ in the staunchly Catholic Rhine-Ruhr region.* The parents of both men benefited from Germany’s postwar Wirtschaftswunder, or ‘economic miracle’: Hütter’s father was a businessman from Krefeld, near Düsseldorf, who traded in ...”

“... discrete composition blocks, each enriched (again like a wedding-cake) to maximum capacity. In a class-structure of poetic forms, it is perhaps aptly described as nouveau-riche. Oldham seems at home with that, and the fact may reflect (stylistically rather than biographically speaking) his own odd relations with the court wits. Sardanapalus, traditionally a ...”

“... parodic woman’s novel seems initially all about. The title proclaims another skirmish in the sex war, and an unprepossessing jacket reinforces this theme: an unnaturally small, weakly-looking male, the hero, Stanley Duke, is threatened by a half-circle of four towering women. The blurb beckons to women to read, in order to be outraged: ‘it is not a book ...”

“... twice, which proved to me once and for all that I was not cut out for education. After the last war began, my cousins, one by one, were called up into the Army. A few months later, they came out again, one by one, and went home, and burned their uniforms in the bedroom grate. They then lived, without identity-card or ration-book or gas-mask, and went on ...”

“... off my hat to Balzac! I must open it!’ Satire can’t buy you friends but it buys you a better class of enemy (the aphorism, originally applied to money, has a ring of Karl Kraus but is Spike Milligan’s). Bennett had been dead for five years when Cape announced the imminent appearance of The Roaring Queen in 1936, but there was enough disobliging matter ...”

“... in recent years, it has fallen, ineffective, to the ground. One million marched against the war in Iraq (I think it was one, Judt says two, I loved the inflation): it made no difference. There is a fundamental ‘disconnect’ between the people and those who claim to represent them. As the last 18 months have so brutally testified, the ...”