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“... three hours’. Lesser collaborators were also tolerated, as long as their second-class status was clear. Hence, in part, Welles’s treatment of men like Stewart, the dubbing mixer, and his frequent problems with writers. Welles was as extreme a proponent of authorial or artistic autonomy – what Callow calls ‘that perennially sensitive ...”

“... This provocative book directs itself against some of the main trends in art history since World War Two. Almost fifty years ago, Erwin Panofsky stood up to defend the Renaissance before a gathering of scholars at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It was the climacteric of the ‘revolt of the medievalists’, the movement whose followers argued that the ...”

“... laughter, is to understand the manifold potentialities of the word ‘front’. North Sea, First War, BNP, con, flash. Seabrook is a very mouthy writer, his rude tongue perpetually thrust into someone else’s cheek. He pronounces: Eliot sat here, he took a tram, he dined alone in the ‘white’ room. Look at his memorial, his Margate plaque, the anagram on ...”

“... connected to the rest of the book.) And these strands correspond, roughly speaking, to the general class structure of Amis’s fiction, as disclosed in the final pages of Koba the Dread. ‘The aristocracy, the intelligentsia’ and ‘the lumpenproletariat’ take their turns in the spotlight, while ‘the urkas’ – the criminal classes – drive the ...”

“... a couple of other collections that have recently appeared in paperback, Martin Amis’s The War against Cliché and Frank Kermode’s Pleasing Myself. That’s a tough poker table to ask anyone to sit at, and it’s impressive that some of Hitchens’s best pieces, or at least some of his best paragraphs, don’t seem out of place. It’s true that he ...”

“... Flight 93 – a daily flight from Newark to San Francisco – and was escorted to seat 1B in first class. Forty-six minutes after take-off, at 9.28 a.m., he and three other passengers tied red scarves around their heads and seized control of the plane. Al-Jarrah grew up during Lebanon’s civil war. His father was a senior ...”

“... encounters someone less single-mindedly opposed to News International than he is – and the class of supposed lickspittles extends from his colleagues on the Culture Committee to the BBC business editor Robert Peston and the Director of Public Prosecutions. A polemic can hardly be faulted for being quick to judge, but there is an important issue ...”

“... childhood: rain, leaves, Halloween pumpkins, galoshes, the smell of the coat closet at the back of class, wet wool and shiny oilskins, the last days of recess outside in the playground, before the onset of cold, the going back of the clocks and, along with that, darkness, the lit rooms and closed curtains of winter. The world through these windows, where ...”

“... magazine’, Country Life was founded in 1897 to cater for the leisured interests of the upper class, and was devoted to articles on golf and racing, leavened with discreet advertisements for manorial estates. Now a subsidiary of Time Inc., it has become a lavishly ornamented real estate window for the 1 per cent, and for those who dream of joining that ...”

“... the rank of major as a result of the military equivalent of corporate restructuring after the Cold War. A marine’s son who grew up on overseas bases and spent his army career abroad, he’d barely set foot in America beyond a few years at West Point. So he decided to wander around the country, hitching rides or taking trains or buses, in order to satisfy his ...”

“... used by beggars and vagabonds’, ‘a particular form of speaking peculiar to some certain class or body of men’, ‘a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms’, ‘barbarous jargon’. John scorns Boswell and Johnson’s fantasies of human goodness and curiosity. Abandoned by his brother and envious of his ‘playing Plato to ...”

“... than 500 miles an hour and exploded in a fireball that lit the sky. The cockpit, with the first-class section still attached, landed beside a church in the village of Tundergarth. Over the next few days rescuers made a fingertip search of the crash site: 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 people on the ground had been killed. Bodies and debris were ...”

“... who profit from state-funded violence and who advertise their greed as a self-righteous war on evil. It is nice to see that, after a century and a half of misinformed adulation, Vidocq is finally getting his just deserts. Eugène-François Vidocq was born in 1775 in Arras, where his parents ran a bakery. After bullying and pilfering his way through ...”

“... to cook for the salade niçoise I switch on TV and catch a clip of the always excellent World at War, and it’s Speer talking. Speer escaped the death penalty at Nuremberg and ultimately survived for one reason alone: class. He could have been an English gentleman. The person he most resembles is Kenneth ...”

“... federal grants for health, welfare and education. He believes that America is mired in a ‘silent war’ between Christians and the left, but his advocacy of ‘religious liberty’ – for example, the right of a business to refuse to serve a gay couple – does not extend to Muslims, whom he would monitor and regulate. He has claimed that parts of Europe ...”