“... Lesson of the Master’, Henry St George, the older novelist, offers the young writer Paul Overt a demonstration in self-sufficiency. He tells him a writer would do better not to marry, to put his passion into his work. Then marries the girl they both admire. That doesn’t stop Paul Overt offering an encomium ...”

“... for a university discussion to a church door in Wittenberg, a muddy three-street town on the north German plain. The pinball machine of history then sent the consequences flying round the continent, and we are still observing the ricochets. Within fifty years of this apparently trivial action (Luther’s seminar never took place), people were calling the ...”

“... party’s 2019 slogan, ‘Get Brexit Done’; the former Vote Leave director of communications, Paul Stephenson; and Ben Guerin, one half of Topham Guerin, the political consultancy firm that rebranded the Conservatives’ official Twitter account as a fact-checking service during a pre-election debate.*Johnson, the group agreed, needed a simple message ...”

“... but hierarchical domination’. In Ecology of Freedom he drew on work by the anthropologists Paul Radin and Marshall Sahlins, who argued that hunter-gatherer societies had been far more prosperous than previously thought and were humankind’s original ‘affluent societies’. Bookchin claimed hierarchy hadn’t existed in these ...”

“... the contributors are no sort of Marxist (David Marquand, for example) and two, Michael Rustin and Paul Hirst, are politely but firmly critical of the New Times thesis. It says something about their editorial style that no attempt is made by the editors to answer or even comment on Rustin and Hirst, though their criticisms are very damaging. What is the ...”

“... enrich understanding of and interest in 18th-century Britain. At much the same time as Paul Mellon was avidly seeking out the sort of Georgian art that many British collectors ignored, and Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis was buying up the letters and ephemera of the then neglected figure, Horace Walpole, a Yale historian whose very name trumpeted ...”

“... a former Nato commander; and General Charles A. Horner, the former commander-in-chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Unfortunately, Schell did not interview the man whose presence within this movement might most astonish those who have not been following recent developments: Ambassador Paul Nitze, the ...”

“... the memorable Storeyism, ‘the shell had cracked.’ Colin Saville makes his break, turning like Paul Morel towards the light of the city on the hill. He’s done with school-mastering. ‘You haven’t any lodgings or anything,’ his lachrymose mother tells him as he prepares to catch the train to London. ‘I don’t need lodgings,’ Saville ...”

“... and agile women (who had plainly ‘not been crippled in the usual manner’: this was in the north of the country) that he could hardly refrain from crying out: ‘Oh, brave new world, That has such people in it!’ To the resentment of the mandarins, he negotiated a curtailed form of the kowtow (down on one knee and the head bowed) when received by the ...”

“... the superlatives of their critics. Volume 36, for instance, investigated the Parish of St Paul, Covent Garden, and not only provided a magisterial history of Inigo Jones’s piazza, but also, in its account of the Bedford Estate, made a major contribution to the study of patrician urban landownership. And three years later, in the next volume, the ...”

“... Danzig, Natalia Ginzburg’s divided Italy, Elizabeth Bowen’s London, Nicholas Monsarrat’s North Atlantic, Norman Mailer’s Pacific, Olivia Manning’s Balkans, John Hersey’s Hiroshima ... Among other matters, these writers record the largest, most urgent set of human migrations the world has ever seen, and the responses of the displaced to ...”

“... British control of Palestine, had made him unpopular in Britain). My family milieu was very much North London professional-academic, and what was then called progressive. We were all admirers of Israel, as were the newspapers and magazines we read, the Guardian and the New Statesman. In the early 1960s, when I read Hecht’s memoir, the only support for ...”

“... pursued ideas of material progress, or ‘improvement’. In The Invention of Improvement (2015), Paul Slack interestingly showed how a word that originally referred to profitable agrarian innovation took on a more general meaning as a progressive slogan for beneficial change of any kind. ‘Improvement’ was the application of reason and ingenuity to the ...”

“... itself, radically deformed.Ion-Isidor Goldstein was born in 1925 in the town of Botoșani in north-east Romania. His father, Jindrich, was a successful businessman. His mother, Saly, ran the two family homes. She gave him the nickname Izu, which he went on to adopt as his nom de guerre. Isou’s first, ongoing fight was with his father, and he found an ...”

“... and 1640, the Empire of the kings of Spain stretched from the Philippines to the shores of the North Sea. The 19th-century Russian Empire covered more territory and the British had a larger population, but no other European empire was spread so widely or embraced so many different peoples. This behemoth has conventionally been called the Spanish Empire. At ...”