“... was a very, very dangerous job,’ Albertina says. ‘We used to put a plank down, 70 foot high, then run across [that] plank carrying another plank. No harnesses, we’d just run across. You had to have bottle. A lot of the Scotland Road lads went over and did the job. And there were a lot of Birkenhead lads, who’d come from similar areas. Some ...”

“... of Skopelos to the chariots often depicted on pots. But until the 1952 decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, the ruling orthodoxy was that a hypothesised ‘Minoan’ was the (un-Greek) language of the palace culture of Crete and the Mycenaean settlements, so that the origins of the Iliad must come after that, not earlier than the ...”

“... kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity’ to the unctuous ‘Empire-Lite’ of Michael Ignatieff and the ‘liberal imperialism’ peddled by Robert Cooper, one of Blair’s fly-by-night gurus. ‘Islamofascism’ seemed as evil as Nazism, Saddam Hussein was another Hitler, a generation-long battle loomed, and invocations of Winston ...”

“... is not a random choice. Reading Price’s extracts from the self-dramatising journal kept by Michael Leiris in the Thirties in which he describes how he robbed masks and fetishes in Africa, it is hard not to dream about returning them (and Leiris, bound hand and foot) to the tribes in question. Reading her detailed ...”

“... romantic hero of his early novels, Andrews in The Man Within, Oliver Chant in Name of Action, and Michael Crane in Rumour at Nightfall. There is too much self-love, too little self-criticism in these early portraits of pleasant anguished young men built up from Greene’s own notion of himself as a young man romantically caught in the toils of love.’ The ...”

“... and the glaciated granite valleys that make its arteries. The sequoias rise so tall, on their 200-foot trunks like furred brown tendons, that as you stand beneath them and look upward to their crowning needle-clusters, you feel yourself sucked through a time-tunnel into some primal and unpeopled continent. Muir rejoiced to think that they were in their prime ...”

“... a Manifesto that was described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’ and shot itself with Foot. Then, it got just 28 per cent. But even in 1987, with party political videos to remind the nation that Young Upwardly-Mobile Kinnocks – ‘Yuk-kies’, Jenkins can’t resist suggesting – had displaced the wild-eyed patricians, it got only 32. Neil ...”

“... vote reflected national percentages almost exactly. But in 1988 it produced a higher vote for Michael Dukakis, against George Bush, than any other state bar one. The residents of Sherman Hill attest to a strong left-wing strain in Iowa’s politics which has been influential and may be so again. They worry about health, education, environment, with the ...”

“... at the end when Rogozhin and Myshkin keep watch over Nastasia Filippovna’s body, whose naked foot protrudes from the sheet while a fly buzzes over the Jeyes fluid, makes one feel that Dostoevsky did not always turn parody into new reality and the Gothic into his own version of the electrically banal. John Jones may be right to write off The Idiot in his ...”

“... withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither ... – Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy ...   Her image had passed into his soul for ever, and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at ...”

“... Covell’s scholarly, discriminating and curiously detached study of the Cambridge fogeys – Michael Oakeshott, John Casey, Maurice Cowling and Roger Scruton – with side-glances at Shirley Robin Letwin and the conservative potential in Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Other than that, some of the ...”

“... New Class in 1956. The fullest account of the phenomenon in the Soviet Union is contained in Michael Voslensky’s Nomenklatura (1984). This shows how the privileged – by rank and, increasingly, by birth – are sealed off from the many intractable problems of everyday Soviet life, which, Stephen Cohen maintains in his interesting volume of essays, put ...”

“... school early, with embarrassingly few qualifications, meant that Major was struggling to get his foot on the ladder – any ladder – at an age when Heath and Thatcher had already made good their escape by scrambling onto the upward escalator at Oxford University. Not until Major landed a job with the Standard Bank in 1966, aged 23, did his prospects start ...”

“... rose from the burning roofs of monasteries, not from animal funeral pyres; the crisis was not foot and mouth but rebellion. The Pilgrimage of Grace, as the convulsions came to be known, was the largest and most menacing of a succession of ‘Tudor Rebellions’, to quote the title of a seasoned classic by Anthony Fletcher (1968), recently revised by ...”

“... LNU is a way to examine its changing practices and norms. Who signed up to be internationalism’s foot soldiers? What kind of culture sustained this popular movement? Trawling through the detritus of branch minutes, pamphlets, memoirs and LNU publications, McCarthy offers some answers. Her findings won’t surprise anyone familiar with the new social history ...”