“... international benefactors. Then again, in the ideologically-charged aftermath of the Second World War, most of the nations of the emergent Third World chose to listen to the siren song of the developed world. India, in stark contrast, under the influence of those associated with the Nehru-Mahalanobis model of development, elected to develop its own industrial ...”

“... transformation taking place over the period of the Belle Epoque, speeded up by the First World War, and definitively achieved by the 1920s. Other countries might give different dates. The English might point to the fact that it was in 1865 that so many people wished to be present at the Eton and Harrow cricket match that ropes had to be put up around the ...”

“... of M&B readers were not, as prejudice had it, the descendants of mill girls, but well-educated Class A ladies. Another nugget of research aired again here is the survey undertaken in 1970 into the distribution of bookshops in England. (No surprises: ‘the best provision of bookshops per head of the population is found in the south-east.’) More ...”

“... and superintendent of the Sunday School, a son who was in his youth himself a teacher in the Bible class. The post office was in the same building as the excellent public library, which was based on the collection left by the engineer Thomas Telford, and to this the boy had free access and benefited in no common way. Moreover, there was a marvellous ...”

“... inauthentic. The queen is Harriet Scrope, novelist, plot-stealer and ferocious egotist, whose war against the world she inhabits extends to her best friend and her cat. As a comic portrait of the artist, Harriet scores high. She is estranged and she is hostile. She is a bit like Dyer. ‘Tho’ I was young Thomas Chatterton to those I met, I was a very ...”

“... 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 ...”