“... little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from the wheels of a bicycle: the picture frame is divided by a balancing bar carried by the ...”

“... calls itself the City of the Titanic, as indeed it was, but it has clearly broken out of the dying North Atlantic trading economy whose long decline, and the consequent sectarian battle for working-class jobs, was the economic basis for the current cycle of the Troubles, dating from the hungry 1960s. The Harland and Wolff shipyard, once the busiest in the ...”

“... don’t have the power they once did. He made it into Parliament in 2010 as Conservative MP for North East Somerset and has been there ever since, stiffening the already near-rigid sinews of the Faragist party within a party. His maiden speech in Parliament invoked ‘three great Somerset men’ as his models: Alfred the Great, ‘the first ...”

“... Kershaw’s The End about the last days of Hitler. I turn the page and there is a photograph of Joseph Goebbels inspecting some troops of the Volkssturm in Silesia in March 1945. He’s shaking hands with Willi Hübner, a child of 16, which is unremarkable except that next to Hübner (and also in the Volkssturm) is Peter Cook. He is looking at Goebbels with ...”

“... has turned elves into an endangered species, surviving in numbers only far in the north. Newly built houses have no soul (‘a broken rash of houses … like a ring of pink scum’). Some modern amenities (chip shops) earn grudging approval, most do not. Sightseers leave litter. ‘You found the world easier to master by hands ...”

“... Hania (right) On Monday, 12 June, Rania and Naseem went to the Sainsbury’s by the canal at the north end of Ladbroke Grove. They went from there to the Westway Centre off Portobello Road; that was where Rania took English classes (she had the best attendance) and she was due to graduate that day so they went there and met up with their friend Muna ...”

“... in the face, and with a whip across chest and back. I then collapsed.2‘Arrests upon arrests,’ Joseph Goebbels noted with satisfaction. ‘Now the Red pest is being thoroughly rooted out.’ By April, 25,000 communists were in ‘protective custody’. Dachau, the first official concentration camp, was set up to hold them. Hobsbawm, whose parents had died ...”

“... Dogs’ would be nothing without its frenetic cowbell). The Diamond Dogs tour of North America, too, was an overblown extravaganza, Bowie performing on a $400,000 stage set of giant model skyscrapers, bridges and cranes, dosed up on cocaine. One of the more unlikely members of his entourage was Alan Yentob, who joined him on the road for a ...”

“... himself. As with so many Pre-Raphaelite paintings the feeling is one of impending doom with even Joseph a slightly sinister figure. 4 July. The Home Secretary announces that because of ‘public concern’ (which probably means one article in the Daily Mail) he has decided to make it known that Dr Shipman will remain in prison for the rest of his life. This ...”

“... Steering Group that included . . . Alexander Haig Jr, Max Kampelman, Anthony Lake, Samuel Lewis, Joseph Lieberman, Paul Wolfowitz and Mortimer Zuckerman’. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s Deputy Secretary of Defense, is, along with Perle, best known as an architect of the regime change in Iraq. (‘Regime destruction’ may be a more accurate term.) The report ...”

“... Scotland should vote for independence but hope it doesn’t: I don’t want to hear the door slam north of Berwick and find myself locked in a room with Nigel Farage. Whatever​ the result of the Scotland referendum, something’s already changed. There’s nothing like discussion of the reinstatement of old borders, of the transformation of conceptual ...”

“... tradition was not extinguished, but still capable of a remarkable reassertion, was shown by Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March, which appeared in 1932. This great novel, which Lukács came to admire, answers to all his criteria save one, which it pointedly reverses. Lukács believed that the true historical novel was carried by a sense of progress, such as ...”

“... my wife, lived with her parents on Friston Estate, a farm 17 miles beyond Kitale, at the extreme north-western limit of the White Highlands of Kenya, the Trans-Nzoia. The farm was only four or five miles from the ridge which formed the border of the tribal homeland of the Suk, more properly called Pokot, a Southern Nilotic pastoral people. Europeans were not ...”

“... he turned to Classics or Mathematics. At school, the largely Tory boys – it was the Mafeking and Joseph Chamberlain’s stumping the country – did not like a professed Free Trader. It would appear that his own parents did not much care for him either. It is said that they farmed him out to live with an aunt, one of these sad Edwardian ...”

“... fever and dysentery.’The potato crop failed again in 1848, this time mainly in the west and the north-east. In London, in an early instance of effective spin-doctoring, there was a move to insist that the Famine was over, and that any remaining problems could be handled locally. ‘What shocks,’ O Grada writes in The Great Irish Famine, ‘is the size of ...”