“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Turkish village of Guenyeli and the Greek village of Autokoi. This was during the civil war at the time known as the Cyprus Emergency, and the aim of the mission was to prevent either village taking reprisals against the other. While his men were getting into position, Waugh noticed that something was blocking the elevation of the machine gun on the ...”

“... disengagement; and the 29-second-long handshake in 2017 between Trump and Macron was a macho war of wills. A delicate pale hand might indicate that someone doesn’t do manual work; the aged were said to be ‘hoary-handed’ (grey and withered), while sons of the soil are ‘horny-handed’ (rough and calloused). But there was also a purportedly expert ...”

“... so emotionally involved, and her story was not at an end? Frankly tells the story of a shy working-class girl who made her way to the top, and what it cost her. But until events have run their course – until Murrell has appeared in court, which is unlikely to happen until after May next year, and the culture war has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rewriting for our days of Vanity Fair. Like Thackeray’s, Wolfe’s satire is ‘a declaration of war on the established order of things’. And in the style of Thackeray’s ‘How to live on nothing a year’ Wolfe offers at the centre of his black comedy a hilariously plausible accounting of how in New York you can go broke on $980,000 a year (‘the ...”

“... Wilder and Zinneman), as did about twenty producers; only one actor agreed; in the spectator class there were about ten programmers and nearly forty critics, all of them contributors to Time Out. The results were published last month. The list of best directors, 14 of them, includes neither Buñuel nor Rossellini nor Godard nor Mizoguchi and the list of ...”

“... problematic. Mandela is now an homme d’état, accountable largely to the business and political class. Like all grandees, he publishes with an eye to present duties (no less than to posterity). The result is too much retrospective homily and oiling, not to say greasing, of troubled waters; the reader soon feels like a gull in a tanker spillage. The resumé ...”

“... recruited as an economic adviser in 1964, without telling us what it was like to be an inter-war Hungarian radical under ‘a sclerotic, semi-fascist regime, brooding over its Habsburg past’, or to talk about Norway without throwing in a series of quick observations on Norwegians (‘devoted to patriotism, ecological uprightness, liberated but worried ...”

“... 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 ...”