“... My maternal grandfather, Abram, who spoke several languages (Yiddish, Russian, German, English, French, with smatterings of Turkish and Arabic), left Ukraine to escape conscription into the tsar’s army and made his way hair-raisingly across Europe to end up in Liverpool. His wife, Elizabeth, no less enterprising, left Ukraine in search of work, also ...”

“... Liberty Tree – as she does – that it ‘attacks contemporary Unionism for betraying the French and Irish Republican principles of ’98’. You can’t ‘betray’ what you never subscribed to, and Unionism evolved in direct opposition to those enlightened principles. What Paulin is deploring, in this book, is one kind of discontinuity, the ...”

“... Foundation, which the Oxford Department of Education had produced in 1960. When 374 pupils in French lycées, and 335 in German gymnasien, were asked to compile an imaginary Baccalauréat or Abitur in which they were allowed to drop all but four subjects, and to choose those four without restriction, only five out of the 709 chose all four from the ...”

“... Maynard Keynes, Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell Hart, Bronislaw Malinowski, Gilbert Murray, Philip Noel-Baker, George Orwell, Lord Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Toynbee, the Webbs, H.G. Wells or Leonard and Virginia Woolf? Unless clearly backed by an important publishing house or journal, as with Victor Gollancz or ...”

“... which is sometimes also used for Jessica, who is mainly Decca but sometimes Squalor. Nancy is French Lady but sometimes just Lady; in everyday settings she answers to Naunce or Naunceling. Lady Redesdale is The Poor Old Female or Fem and her husband is most often Farve. Diana is sometimes called Bodley because she was thought by Nancy to have a big ...”

“... girl’: how, he asked in indignation, could his son afford that? Cranborne concluded that the French would never make reliable allies. Macmillan, Crookshank and Cranborne were known to have become hostile to appeasement by the late 1930s, but the three MPs shared a golf-club anti-semitism. When Cranborne went to Versailles in 1919, Macmillan had written ...”

“... version of that entity had been in question for some time. Eliot derived his poetics from the French Symbolists, so that it was impossible for him to follow Matthew Arnold in finding a solution to spiritual turbulence in poetry as such. The language of poetry cannot deliver a solution of this kind, indeed cannot even comment authoritatively on such a ...”

“... as ‘self-realisation’, was ripe with potential for illiberal outcomes. The upshot of both the French and the Russian Revolutions (Berlin had experienced the second of these as a boy) was authoritarian state structures restrictive of individual freedoms. Negative liberty from constraints seemed a ‘more humane ideal’ than the otherwise admirable goal of ...”

“... had Lincoln not been assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide the US between them. But these historical variants are not genuine time-travel narratives on the order of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895), which ...”

“... chairs very reasonably in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less ...”

“... Notturna is divided into three parts. The first opens dramatically onto a staccato account of the French pogrom of 1321 against lepers and Jews, accused of poisoning wells in a plot against Christendom orchestrated by the Muslim ‘King of Granada’. It then moves to 1348 and the massacre of Jews as agents of a conspiracy spreading the Black Death, which ...”

“... historians should consult his remarks on X, Catacomb, and the New English Weekly edited by Philip Mairet, a man of integrity and enthusiasm whom Sisson affectionately evokes: ‘his eyes would light up as visibly as the bulbs on a pin-table, as the ideas rattled round.’ The bohemian world of poets, painters and little magazines, the ‘natural ...”

“... techniques of seduction. Auden was important in other ways. To Britten, words, whether Italian, French or English, spontaneously suggested music. Some of the words provided by Auden might well have looked unpromising, but he set them anyway. He enthusiastically accepted Auden’s rather unsatisfactory book for Paul Bunyan, and it seemed certain that they ...”

“... Girls, which featured an interview with a 21-year-old woman who had had 789 lovers. ‘Prince Philip, Mary Whitehouse, Lord Hailsham and Brigid Brophy were all quoted on what they thought about the subject.’ The only sex-related subject not permitted in the paper was homosexuality. Murdoch was against it: ‘Do you really think the readers are ...”

“... embody this same point: the book opens with Herr contemplating an old map left over from French colonial times, and pondering the uselessness of all abstract Chartings of the war’s terrain, and it ends by insisting on everyone’s personal participation in the conflict: ‘Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.’ The extent of the ...”