“... maligned by historians and the writers of textbook history.’ More recently, shorter lives by Christopher Wright (2005) and Jeremy Black (2020; an earlier full-scale Life was published in 2006) tell much the same story. If we look further back, we find Herbert Butterfield in George III and the Historians (1957) telling ...”

“... of an intellectual aristocracy Waugh thought pompous and pointless. His was the sceptical black comedy of the columnist, which she considered reckless and damaging. She exempted him, however, from her principal objection to his set: This coterie has led the spirit of anti-Europeanism that pervades Tory Party and country. ...”

“... statesmen, like others, did not know what they were doing.’ Something similar is argued by Christopher Clark in The Sleepwalkers, a book whose title says it all. I don’t think this is just an academic spat, a Historikerstreit, with little application to modern political debate. On the contrary, I think it has had a damaging knock-on effect on our ...”

“... and volunteers ready to work for this were dwindling – in Edinburgh on one occasion a ‘Black Circular’ had to be sent round to remind defaulters (I was one) of their duty. As a concession, a commission was set up to study whether the Party Constitution was in need of change. Discussion of this in Edinburgh was in a mild key, largely because our ...”

“... which ‘can easily become the condescending heartlessness which so attenuates [his] fiction’ (Christopher Ricks); who is ‘rich in what is given to few writers and poor in what is given to most men’ (D.J. Enright). We may sneakily feel it appropriate that Nabokov the mandarin spent the last two decades of his life in a hotel suite in Montreux – after ...”

“... made of the Quatuor – a fact which oddly passes without comment in the useful discography by Christopher Dingle that concludes Hill’s book. The Germans were not unsympathetic to these musical endeavours. The camp commander supplied Messiaen with manuscript paper, and found a cello, with one string missing, for Pasquier. A German officer gave Messiaen ...”

“... frog,’ says Heathcote, who is now wading, and grinning in enjoyment at the mud which rises in black circles about his knees. ‘Very common round here, so I’m told.’ Of course, the animal is not a tree frog. Heathcote’s imagination is already providing him with a bestiary for this improbable tropic. It’s a lizard – and I see several more, on the ...”

“... sound like such an ordinary, affirmative, innocuous sort of affair that one wonders why Christopher Ricks and Denis Donoghue do not instantly rush to embrace it. At other times, and for other audiences, it becomes a far more menacing, subversive matter: nothing less than a radicalised form of Marxism, a claim which must come as a mighty surprise to ...”

“... stamped with power, not with poets, the Thames and the Neva rustling like banknotes, then, black on gold, the Hudson’s silhouettes? From frozen Neva to the Hudson pours, under the airport domes, the echoing stations, the tributary of emigrants whom exile has made as classless as the common cold, citizens of a language that is now yours, and every ...”

“... across the pages of Peyton’s book like thistledown. But the cancellations of Blue Streak and Black Arrow, Britain’s own attempts at space launchers, along with the TSR2 – an RAF tactical strike reconnaissance aircraft designed to carry nuclear bombs to a European battlefield – were weighty enough steps at the time. Zuckerman went to see the TSR2 ...”

“... further than most in making sense of the society emerging from the ruins. This was no easy task. Christopher Clark’s recent history of 1848, Revolutionary Spring, shows that most Europeans experienced the preceding decades as a time of ‘flux and transition’. In France, a number of different political futures seemed possible. Some of these were ...”

“... strong point). Brutalism books, like the many photo-blogs they draw on, favour either stark black and white images from when the buildings were new, so that the marks of time aren’t visible on the concrete, or, when the buildings are in better nick, colour photographs in which every pebble of the concrete aggregate is visible. One building, for ...”

“... hills. This is where you find Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, where the Blackwood’s boys James Hogg and Christopher North used to come to liquefy their rhetoric. We entered from a smirr of rain, snoking for supper. It turned out supper was something that happened in the glen before 6.30 p.m. A lady in a white lab coat emerged to remind us of the fact. The phrase ...”

“... children, but because your IQ is so high, we’re going to send you to a private school, St Christopher’s, which takes a few local authority cases like yours,’ the psychologists at University College Hospital had said to me, rather unpsychologically. I was 11.) My father relented and Doris sent me to a progressive day school. At the new school, aged ...”

“... captain, he thrust his hands firmly into the pockets of his reefer-coat and pointed his ‘black torpedo beard’ in a vaguely navigational manner at the distant horizon. Ford he mistook for the gardener. Like James, Conrad was capable of rages which were ‘sudden, violent, blasting and incomprehensible’. The hurt Ford felt is understandable. It was ...”