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“... victory in 1936 ‘carried with it the seeds of hubris’. I was reminded of a passage in Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler: ‘Hubris – that overweening arrogance which courts disaster – was inevitable. The point where nemesis takes over had been reached by 1936.’ The parallel is striking. The Führer’s spectacular success in reclaiming the ...”

“... Eliot). As a reviewer and essayist, he gave respect and appreciation to such various talents as Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell – all British writers. It is hard to believe that he hadn’t read, at some time between its first British publication in 1943 and the writing of ‘High Windows’ in 1967, a book by the writer ...”

“... and critical work, and many readers have returned a negative answer to the question that Ian Parsons, his publisher at Chatto, posed after reading the typescript of an early novel: ‘Is Williams really a novelist?’ Smith makes it plain that Williams thought of himself as primarily ‘a writer’: ‘Between 1948 and 1955 he worked at six separate ...”

“... Garfield interviewed him in 1993, for his superb (and predictably out-of-print) book on Aids in Britain, The End of Innocence: Derek Jarman says he feels like an eighty-year-old man, not only old, but lonely, missing all his friends. Walking along Charing Cross Road towards Chinatown he holds a thin brown stick, too short for his needs … His new haircut ...”

“... those who write or speak recklessly.An echo of the aesthetic defence of Rushdie could be heard in Ian McEwan’s retrospective comment on the affair in the Guardian on 14 September 2012: ‘it seemed like the social glue of multiculturalism was melting away. We were coming apart, and doing it over a postmodern multi-layered satirical novel.’ What work is ...”

“... Charles Saatchi took the podium at the Tate Gallery. It was a very rare public appearance by Britain’s leading private collector of contemporary art. His words were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate. With every ...”

“... If Heshu Yones’s case makes history as the first legally recognised ‘honour killing’ in Britain, it is also remarkable for the testimony left by Heshu herself. ‘Hey, for an older man you have a good strong punch and kick,’ she writes in a farewell note to her father before trying to leave home. ‘I hope you enjoyed testing your strength on ...”

“... policy for saying nothing about the Empire ‘and the part it alone can play in sustaining Great Britain as a Great Power in the world of tomorrow’. The Mirror in this case was out of tune with its readership. The manifest difficulty which the British public found in sustaining interest in the war with Japan after VE Day surely betokened its general lack ...”

“... Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale arguments. (The previous standard text, Ian Kemp’s Tippett: The Composer and His Music, was sketchy on biographical detail and appeared in 1984, when there were still ten years of Tippett’s creative life to come.) Soden admires the early music, but argues consistently that Tippett’s essence is ...”

“... odourless and white. Until this development, three main substances were used for candles in Britain and all had significant flaws. Loveliest by far – both for their light and smell – were beeswax candles, but they were far too expensive for everyday use. Tallow candles were much cheaper but tended to sputter messily and leave a nasty meaty smell in ...”

“... of Men, Alfonso Cuarón’s film from 2006, adapted from a P.D. James novel, set in a near-future Britain of caged refugees and cheap euthanasia, a world in which no children have been born for a generation. As Fisher says, this dystopia extrapolates only a little: I watched the film myself the other day to check I’d remembered it right, and it felt like it ...”

“... operations, two of whom, James Wisheart and Janardan Dhasmana, were struck off even before Ian Kennedy’s report was published. The problems at the infirmary had become public largely through the efforts of Stephen Bolsin, a consultant anaesthetist with an interest in clinical audit, a process in which clinicians’ outcomes are measured. Bolsin ...”

“... 1960s, Pritchett himself, we learn, ‘made significantly more of his income in the USA than in Britain’. Pritchett is known, above all, as a writer of short stories, a form that suited his inclination to the episodic rather than the architectonic. This has led him to be described as ‘the English Chekhov’, but maybe he has to be thought of as a ...”

“... Times or Guardian. Or you might prefer a raucous purveyor of scandal and moral bile like Britain’s Daily Mail or the Sun or the New York Post. These were big titles, but most cities and towns had a daily paper of some kind, with a mix of local and national and international news, comfortably financed by cover price and advertising. During the ...”

“... Malaya, Borneo, Hawaii, Australia, Siam, Burma, Guatemala. Of Human Bondage found a readership in Britain and the US; The Moon and Sixpence (1919) became a bestseller, and Maugham’s travels provided material for story collections, starting with The Trembling of a Leaf (1921). In 1926, he bought the Villa Mauresque – the original structure was built in ...”