“... for the most burglaries in England. The British Epilepsy Association is offices only but has a steel door, having been broken into three times, one of them a ram-raid; so, coming away, I’m perhaps more conscious of vandalism and urban decay than I otherwise might be. The result is, when I see a starved-looking boy of ten and his sister, twelve or ...”

“... in the North, campaigned against Britain joining the EEC at the 1975 referendum. His successor, John Ryman, later jailed for (non-political) fraud, also disdained the Common Market. He called Helmut Schmidt a ‘patronising Hun’. Ronnie Campbell was a die-hard Lexiter; his Tory successor, Ian Levy, rode to victory on Brexit. The figures from the 1975 ...”

“... of Moscow and the dominion of the world. Americans are readily alarmed, sometimes even panicked. John Foster Dulles, who worked for Truman and then became Secretary of State to Eisenhower, with a single-mindedness matching Mao’s lashed together a ring-fence around China, designed to contain the eastern end of the presumed Sino-Soviet monolith as Nato ...”

“... and they were numerous, included both Fitzgeralds, the New York society hostess Muriel Draper, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Nancy Mitford, Dawn Powell, even Mary McCarthy, whose rivalrousness towards other intellectual women is legendary. The fact that Murphy seems to have been one of the kindliest people on earth no doubt only magnified her ...”

“... million ‘illegal aliens’ had been apprehended the previous year. People could cut holes in the steel panels or climb them – there were useful toe and hand holds – but the wall put an end to cars and pick-ups going across and set up a physical marker between north and south. As it grew, it transformed a line defined by international treaty, a few dusty ...”

“... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...”

“... the master builder of a new town for coal-miners in Peterlee, County Durham. Yet as his biographer John Allan has shown, Lubetkin didn’t step back from his vocation till much later.2 Indeed, he was responsible for the overarching design of Cranbrook. Each month he would come up to London, sketchbook bulging with plans.Lubetkin and his protégés, backed by ...”

“... though even less tolerant towards ‘Rome’, was less solidly home-grown in inspiration. John Knox’s church drew its theological ideas from constant European travel, the movement of black-clad divines between Edinburgh and the Calvinist centres in Geneva, the Netherlands and Germany.The third attempt to turn the white cliffs into a red line is the ...”

“... question in Bonn: they wanted to bully Adenauer, an ardent Europhile, out of the European Coal and Steel Community, and to buy off his economic minister, Ludwig Erhard, a free-trade fundamentalist who sympathised with Britain. As a direct counter, Britain founded the European Free Trade Area, EFTA, a club of free-traders that now includes ...”

“... can’t carry much at my age. A little pint bottle is quite heavy.’ He introduced me to John Russell, an 88-year-old ex-engineer in a residential care home. ‘I saw one old lady trying to stagger off with six bottles,’ Russell said. ‘They were carried for her by a complete stranger.’ He introduced me to Joan Bufton, whose daughter needs ...”

“... Labour’s levels of borrowing on the eve of the crash compared favourably with those of John Major’s Conservative government in the early 1990s; and – even if Labour’s petting of the financial sector had left Britain overexposed – in his Keynesian response to the crisis, Gordon Brown had pulled the economy back from the brink of ...”

“... for the labours of its president, Giscard d’Estaing, assisted by a British factotum, John Kerr, the two real authors of the draft, their presence was of no consequence. The future charter of Europe was written for the establishments of the West, the governments of the existing 15 member states who had to approve it, relegating the countries of ...”

“... I see his loving gaze falling on the objects in it: a conch shell on a side table, a painting by John Piper (a wedding gift). Home is never a neutral place, it is a very specific context, an animated expression of the presence it contains. Why can’t it be loved?‘You can’t love an inanimate object.’ I don’t know where he got the sentence from. My ...”

“... states such as Ukraine have no choice but to submit to the nearest great power, has run its course.John Mearsheimer’s argument of recent weeks that what we are seeing played out is ‘not imperialism [but] great-power politics’ will strike many as a distinction without a difference. Imperial history has far more to teach us than our decaying Atlantic ...”

“... endeavour as if it were both inevitable and eternal. The colliery tunnels have fallen in, the steel furnaces are winking out, the fishing fleets have gone for scrap; Britain’s trains are Japanese, its cars German, its clothes from China. And yet Britain still produces three-fifths of its own food. Farmers still raise livestock, plough fields, sow and ...”