“... evocative account was written by someone who was not there, was indeed so far ‘out of it’ that no one in the family had dreamed of inviting him. And if, given the absence of footnotes for the passages in question, one were to ask how he came by such detail, one possible answer is that he made it up. As this episode may suggest, the author of this book is ...”

“... case would never have had the nerve to speak to him. I’d first heard his voice in Exeter College hall some time in 1955. The lower end of the scholars’ table where I was sitting was only a yard or two from high table where the dons dined and, hearing those harsh, quacking tones without knowing whose they were, I said to my neighbour that it sounded like ...”

“... things about them, especially for visitors tramping around in the dark trying to find, say, No. 25, block 5, entrance 3, without benefit of footpaths, adequate lighting or a clear numbering system. The problem is that, on the one hand, Hatherley is bound to reject ‘the architectural views of Charles Windsor’ (elsewhere, he gives him his title) that ...”

“... of Western Orientalism and of Eastern Occidentalism, both of which Tagore confounded. Edward John Thompson (1886-1946) was then an educational missionary at the Wesleyan College at Bankura. He had published several volumes of verse, and was approaching proficiency in Bengali. After a brief meeting in Calcutta, Tagore invited him to visit him at his ...”

“... of the inauguration of an academic programme in October 1895, in two rented rooms in what is now John Adam Street. Nor is it unprecedented for someone who has run the School to write about it. One can point to the austere history of the LSE’s foundation by Sir Sydney Caine, or to what Dahrendorf calls ‘William Beveridge’s intriguing London School of ...”

“... Paul’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, was a bestseller. Another antiquary who was at Hougoumont, John Gage (1786-1842), left an account that is more personal and more chilling than Scott’s, in a journal kept during a visit that was, for him too, a first taste of foreign travel. Gage was 29 in the summer of 1815. From an old-established family of Suffolk ...”

“... see the hanging, drawing and quartering of Thomas Harrison, the first of the regicides, and he was no more pleased with the congestion then. Citizens in Restoration London were obsessed with the nearness of death, also with shaving minutes off everything you could shave minutes off, including crossing the road. Was that the beginning of urban hurriedness, a ...”

“... becoming an annual tradition. We went through Slough, and one slogan we chanted was a riposte to John Betjeman’s poem, with its call for ‘friendly bombs’ to fall on the town: ‘Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Slough – THINK NOW!’In the summer Charlotte worked in London as a volunteer for the Africa Bureau, an anti-colonial think tank and part of the ...”

“... There is also one small new exhibition space and a new entrance, the abbots’ medieval gateway no longer considered fit for purpose. Desmoulin’s building is too big and too brassy on the outside, but Cluny has survived worse and the interior reorganisation is an impressive success. The displays are lucid and uncluttered, there is a sense of freshness ...”

“... was the lineal descendant of the Labour rebellion. But dissent in the Conservative Party presented no comparable threat. Since Harold Macmillan’s first application for membership in 1962, it had been settled policy to join the European Community. Now, with a decisive House of Commons vote behind it, the British would be ‘good Europeans’, at least as long ...”

“... to the Kennedys or the Daleys in Chicago. The ETU resistance (it was hardly less) had received no succour from the mainstream of the Trade Union movement, whose passivity when confronted with the infamous conduct of Foulkes, Haxell, Fraser and the rest of the Communist conspiracy devastatingly proclaimed a comfortable, institutional mediocrity of ...”

“... but simply that the past, as I had perceived it, was defined by an absence of colour. No one who grew up in the age of black and white photography and film could have suffered under the same illusion. But nor, until relatively recently, would a child’s perception of the past have been necessarily, or primarily, defined by images: things, like ...”

“... invariably demeaned by its occupant. Sixty years ago this month, the then Tory Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, chose to announce a new Public Order Bill in the course of an offensive and thoroughly partisan speech at Cleckheaton Town Hall which just happened to be delivered in the same week in which Labour’s annual ...”

“... him as laughably small-scale: ‘just kindergarten stuff’. In Vidal’s native land there is no need of cash-for-questions. The deal there is cash-for-answers. And the answers are delivered in the form of ‘special legislation’. In America sleaze makes a difference. At first, the spectacle of Vidal pulling his New World patrician stunt was pretty ...”

“... any of them represent tragedy in the classic or Shakespearean sense.’ (This is because they have no feeling that the sadness and loss are without a purpose.) The tellers of bomb stories, however, were not artists and not historians. They can’t be held guilty of ‘emplotment’, meaning that their interpretation affects their selection of facts, and I get ...”