“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... almost a thousand scientists had detected evidence of gravitational waves emanating from a pair of black holes 1.3 billion light years from Earth. It was empirical confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The observation required astonishing technical precision: the 4 km-long arms of each of the two branches of Ligo, three thousand miles ...”

“... 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. ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... once. I caught one use of ‘silky’ – another word which, in a football context, means ‘black’ – but no ‘naive’, until last night. We came so close.30 June. There was something particularly disappointing about the brawl at the end of the Germany v. Argentina game. I’m not talking about the girly flailing that passed for a fight – a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... world of Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, Levellers and millenarian preachers which E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill describe in their work. For Thompson, Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the two ‘founding texts of the English working-class movement’ (the other is The Rights of Man). And so to admire Bunyan is by definition to be a dissenting radical, a ...”

“... of Athenodorus and Athenodotus. Achilles-names, including Achillodorus, are popular in the Black Sea region, where the hero had important cults. Generally speaking, god-names were less common than you might expect for women – because a baby girl was not considered the answer to a prayer? – and more common than you might expect for slaves, the ...”

“... TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never fails.Ernest William Hornung, always known as Willie, was born in Middlesbrough in 1866, the youngest of eight children of a coal merchant from ...”

“... publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and others. But in this too, oddly enough, one can fail to find Larkin: because the desire to make tribute tends to move the stress towards the more public, more social ...”