“... but when the children of tradespeople and craftworkers were missed panic spread through working-class districts and into the city at large. Schoolmasters put up notices asking parents to escort their children to and from school, as they could not be responsible for their safety. ‘Stranger-danger’ was in everyone’s mind – casual passers-by were ...”

“... tone when it was published in 1954. He was born (in 1922) into the clerical lower middle class, his father commuting from Norbury in London’s southern suburbs to his undemanding but respectable job at the Cannon Street offices of J. and J. Colman, the mustard firm. An only child of bookish disposition, Kingsley won a scholarship at City of London ...”

“... did fine, and in the developing world, especially Asia, economies grew, but the global middle class, mainly located in the developed world, felt increasingly anxious, ignored, resentful and angry. The decades-long decline in union power made these trends worse. The UK had its longest ever peacetime squeeze on earnings.1 In response to this the political ...”

“... respectable Victorians in their quiet Belgravia squares.After Woolwich, I was in unearned business-class luxury. I had the cool clean carriage, and potentially the entire train, to myself. Using my Freedom Pass, given out originally to tempt veterans into healthy London fringe expeditions, I was riding like an oligarch in a private jet. I had everything apart ...”

“... houses: the prospect of owning a home, which would allow them to ascend into solidly middle-class existence, seemed remote.It wasn’t long before she was practising her ideal signature: ‘Mabel Loomis Dickinson’. Ned, the Dickinsons’ eldest son, fell for her immediately. He suffered from epilepsy, a big taboo in the 19th century, and had led a ...”

“... and wealthy film-maker, when he began asking me about life in Cuba. Those were the days of the war in Vietnam and Americans were regressing to the late Thirties, the decade when they suffered the vision of the blind in seeing Stalin as a saviour of civilisation as they knew it. Among the guests of this liberal director there was a well-known Austrian ...”

“... Britain, and considers Smith’s Rhodesia a great agricultural success story. By that time the war between black nationalist fighters seeking majority rule (‘terrorists’, Agnew calls them) and the white-led regime was well under way. Agnew was sufficiently inspired by the Rhodesian cause to try to join the country’s army, but failed to make it ...”

“... workers of Campbeltown; but at least the disadvantaged people of Vietnam, who suffered decades of war and the inept imposition of a Soviet-style command economy by the war’s victors, are now enjoying the fruits of a boom. Well, yes. But also very much no.AUS​ military map from the late 1960s, when the American ...”

“... which appeared to obsess him, went back to his original agreement to let them publish the Afghan war logs. He quickly fell out with the journalists and editors there – essentially over questions of power and ownership – and by the time I took up with him felt ‘double-crossed’ by them. It was an early sign of the way he viewed ‘collaboration’: the ...”

“... rejected by the Army, for reasons of age or incapacity, and so the show went on through the Great War. One of the earliest sketches to lodge in the memory of lifelong fans was a skit about the Emperor Napoleon called I’ll Say She Is! Its mode is runaway farce, a pastiche without a prayer for logic, and any sample suggests about as much as any other: ‘Our ...”

“... their difference, flaunted it. At my high school, an older boy insisted on wearing full makeup to class; and he was accepted in a patronising kind of way, his brazen otherness putting others at ease. They knew where they were with him; and he felt at least comfortable with their stable contempt. The rest of us who lived in a netherworld of sexual insecurity ...”

“... the oracle was still unfulfilled and guessed that the victories Apollo promised were victories in war, not games. They made Tisamenus a Spartan citizen, purloining for Sparta his five-fold fated good fortune. With the seer onside Sparta began to clock up successes. First of the five was the battle of Plataea, fought against the Persians in 479 BC. The final ...”

“... there comes a time when ‘then they went to bed’ suffices; or when the bed is to society what war was to von Clausewitz, a continuation of politics by other means. To remain as interested intrinsically in sex as Colette was all her life long, and as Mrs Hutchins continues to be, requires an almost monastic single-mindedness. Now some of the ...”

“... touch’), and that if you’re not prepared to waive a mark-up on a debt, war will be waged against you by God and the Prophet. One sharia-compliant banker I met last year told me that’s about as bad as it gets. There is also an injunction to forgive debt in a broader sense: ‘If the debtor is in difficulty, then delay things ...”

“... do the capture and storage for us. Twenty-five years ago, one of the 11-year-olds in my science class asked our teacher why ‘they’ didn’t invent machines to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. ‘They have,’ Mr Cooney replied. ‘They’re called trees.’ But trees are slow growing, and vulnerable to fire and chainsaws, and when they rot or ...”