“... in Palestine from 1931 to 1938, co-ordinated his strategy with the local Zionist leader, David Ben Gurion, yet complained to his Private Secretary: ‘The thing is I have never met the PM and I don’t suppose I ever shall. Weizmann can go in there when he wants to.’ It was an important factor in keeping British officials ‘on message’, even when they ...”

“... will go for me on the Jewish thing. I have a lot of references to Jews, ‘the smart Jews like Ben Hecht ... It ... does not make one love the Jews any better ... Asch hit him out of kike gratitude ... I’m all for keeping out of the manuals of the Semites as long as possible’: that kind of noise. But this was conventional then, Pos, you remember. It ...”

“... or just ‘Hailsham’. No one, after all, would dream of writing a biography of, say, Harold Wilson and calling it ‘Lord Wilson’ because deep down we know that was all a hollow sham. But Lewis clearly feels that Hogg is, well, lordly. In a sense this hits the nail on the head, and not just because he was twice ...”

“... John Stuart Roberts’s compact and readable single volume of 1999, we now have Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s double-header, with Max Egremont’s somewhat shorter Life expected soon. Sassoon’s story has also reached a wider audience through television re-creations and through Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration. The image of the gallant officer who sickens of ...”

“... the failure is historic and deliberate, at which point, of course, it becomes OK.Glass’s father, Ben, the son of Latvian Jews, kept a record store in Baltimore, and had a good knowledge of classical music old and new, but was hardly the sensitive type. He was a tough ex-Marine who, if he caught someone shoplifting, would take them outside and beat them ...”

“... high culture” is a phrase which would have your average critic – an Auberon Waugh, an A.N. Wilson – reaching for a metaphorical shotgun.’ At this point the country is being said to be debarred from sharing in a tradition which, as Kundera himself has made clear, it helped to invent. Taylor later says that categorising is ‘unhelpful’, but that ...”

“... Zuckerman had an answer, but his logic forced people to put the correct questions. In 1964, Harold Wilson asked Zuckerman to go to the House of Lords and become Minister for Disarmament. Zuckerman very sensibly calculated that he could be more use as a civil servant. In 1966, Wilson sent him to the Cabinet Office and made ...”

“... the public, on both sides of the Atlantic, to the fact that it was pure fantasy. (‘What does Ben know of dukes?’ was the reaction of Disraeli’s father, a middle-class man of letters, when he read his son’s earlier novels; Arthur Waugh, not unlike Isaac D’Israeli, took a quizzical view of his son’s upper-class fantasies.) Brideshead Revisited ...”

“... George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson or, since his was assuredly an ‘alien pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the doubtful honour of being the Dark Lady are discussed (so far as the list went in 1970) and a slight preference is registered for Mary Fitton, who had a good ...”

“... scope for compromise between them. Prominent among the sceptics is the historian and biographer Ben Pimlott, whose Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks is a selection from his prolific writings as an essayist and reviewer. It is not unusual in Britain for a historian to win fame and fortune as a biographer: Pimlott’s achievement was to make the lives of Hugh ...”

“... North Sea oil, resentment over the poll tax, the closure of the Ravenscraig steelworks. Ben Jackson’s intricate account of the intellectual development of Scottish nationalism marks a highly original departure from the norm, and allows us to distinguish the various progressive themes that have since the 1960s enriched and transformed the populism ...”

“... cents’. It was also easy to praise performances, whether on stage (Eddie Cantor, Jacob Ben-Ami and the ‘flawless’ Barrymore brothers were favourites) or in the stalls. Germs of short stories can be found in her descriptions of the couple who argue over Bernard Shaw’s symbols, the woman who ‘speculates, never in silence’ about what’s ...”

“... from the dead, he married Nancy Nicholson (daughter of William Nicholson the painter, sister to Ben Nicholson and herself a skilful illustrator and designer), with whom he had three children by 1922, although it was never quite clear how keen the strongly feminist Nancy was on being married to him. Meanwhile he was supposed to be studying English literature ...”

“... hear of ‘its growing reputation for anti-British views’, while we learn that James Reston and Ben Bradlee (of the Washington Post) art ‘left-wing trendies’. Georgetown University, the haunt of so many Reaganite super-hawks (including Jeanne Kirkpatrick), is rubbished as having ‘moved sharply to the Left’. This sort of thing is quite palpable ...”

“... age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of bad luck too. She was rammed by a warship in 1911 and limped into port with ...”