“... is ultimately what matters, and how rare it is for a critic to admit this. Ida, incidentally, I took at first to be a friend of the family, but she turned out to be a devout Catholic German – Ida Frederike Görres – whose diaries and letters of the Fifties, Broken Lights, were published by Burns and Oates. Toynbee disliked her inbred Catholicism but ...”

“... career, he wasn’t a team player.’ All the same, he still walks the corridors of power: ‘He took on such assignments as pleased the operator in him, the behind-the-scenes Teddy Regler: in the Persian Gulf, with a Japanese whiskey firm looking for a South American market, with the Italian police tracking terrorists. None of these activities compromised ...”

“... and commoditised society, and prepared the nation for the great leap forward that the economy took in the 1780s. The consequences of this transformation were everywhere to be seen. Greater prosperity for nearly all classes, albeit unevenly distributed, led to the production and purchase of more consumer goods, to more entertainment and recreation, and to ...”

“... That project failed, because it could only be used between humans, about topics that humans took an interest in: now, with computers to commune with, just such languages have had to be devised. Is that how Turing’s scientist must talk and think, totally impervious to poetry, puns or passion? Formal computer languages certainly affect our attitude to ...”

“... of bread would undergo a fission chain reaction of devastating power. Historical determinism then took him to Los Alamos – and into the domain of these other books. There they all were, some of the best academic physicists in the world, plonked down in a mushrooming encampment in the wilds of New Mexico and told to make an atom bomb. The recollections of ...”

“... by the scholastic theologians who followed Abelard, and became a dogma with the humanists who took over from them in the Renaissance. The reformed Abelard may figure as the author, in the West, of the idea that Christianity is a spiritual, not a social, faith and religion. To that degree he was out-Bernarding St Bernard and out-Hildebranding the Gregorian ...”

“... restored to all its members, would such symptoms of social disease be eradicated. Emile Durkheim took account of neither Peuchet nor Marx in his celebrated Suicide of 1897, a chilly work which claimed to document ‘social facts’ without needing to recount the feelings of the individuals concerned. He broke suicides down into ‘egotistic’ and ...”

“... Post from his father-in-law, Eugene Meyer, and his shy, self-effacing wife, Katharine, who took over the company when her husband shot himself in 1963. It was Philip Graham who induced John Kennedy to choose Lyndon Johnson as his running-mate in 1960. This was wise and far-reaching advice, for without Johnson on the ...”

“... either scholarly – new material come to light – or critical: new slant on a known personality. John Bierman does have some fresh material. ‘New documentary sources,’ he writes, ‘include the hitherto unpublished expedition journals of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier ...”

“... sending the message stating that “our war is over” which started the correspondence with John Major, and it is pretty clear in retrospect that one of the intermediaries in the chain between the government and the IRA did in fact embellish the message.’ The peace process, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff is suggesting, began with an ...”

“... in 1985, left to his son Jeremy make this the most complete account to date. Operation Mincemeat took its cue from one of 12 detective novels written by Basil Thomson. Thomson, who had been head of the CID and a First World War spycatcher, was perhaps more convincing as a mystery writer than as a detective. He had cleared Mata Hari of espionage, and he ...”

“... John Mortimer’s book has a thoroughly misleading title. It is designed to enlist a little pathetic sympathy for someone carried along like a piece of flotsam without the courage or determination to strike out for the shore. It would be difficult – judging from the book itself – to find anyone less shipwrecked than John Mortimer and less likely to pursue this policy if shipwrecked ...”

“... when it came to buttoning up the children’s coats.’ Rather than endure the staffroom, she took refuge in her classroom at lunchtime.Children, she writes, ‘are not born with race and colour prejudice. They absorb it from the adults around them.’ Gilroy countered the bigotry, or at times the simple stupidity, of colleagues, parents and the children ...”

“... of northern heights, shaggy with forest. There should be deer there, perhaps a mammoth. The fire took hold and warmed them. Soon the group was spreading out and – without regard to colour, sexual preference, age, size or creed – beginning to gather the nuts, berries and tubers and to share them democratically, once more in balance with the environment ...”

“... Some​ of M. John Harrison’s books have aliens in and carry endorsements from China Miéville; others are alien-free and endorsed by Robert Macfarlane. He has fans who’ve read all the science fiction but not Climbers (1989), his semi-autobiographical masterpiece about rock climbing in the North of England, and fans who are effusive about Climbers but won’t go near the sci-fi ...”