“... or relapsed into anonymous existence. We follow to Auschwitz Sophia Levinton, a Jewish doctor, a major in the Medical Corps, captured at Stalingrad, because she happens to be a friend of Yevgenia Shaposhnikova. The latter’s brother-in-law Viktor, an atomic physicist, the most important but least realised character in the novel, is there to make the painful ...”

“... Today, six years after New York’s financial crisis was precipitated by the refusal of the major New York City banks to underwrite one of the City’s routine bond issues, New York’s prospects seem healthier, and the lessons to be learned from its fiscal tightrope act seem more appropriate for less developed countries struggling with international ...”

“... and, through their persistent and popular hostility to ‘Kulturbolschewismus’, culturally. The major centrist thinkers – Mann, Max Weber, Walther Rathenau, none of them instinctive democrats, but urged on by fear of the gun-happy right – managed to justify a democratic republic as the necessary successor to an unrestorable Reich. So, of course, did the ...”

“... When John Wesley visited Bath in 1739 to inveigh against the follies that flourished at hot springs, he was challenged by a fleshy, domineering figure in a white beaver hat, who demanded to know by what authority he was preaching. Wesley’s retort (or so he claimed) was ‘Pray, sir, are you a justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply ...”

“... economic prowess was already more than a little annoying to Washington: that year saw the first major postwar US-Japan trade confrontation, one that would culminate in the imposition of a temporary surcharge on Japanese imports. Nevertheless, the US regarded Japan with satisfaction. In American eyes, the country had been reborn two decades earlier as a ...”

“... can to shut them all down.The present crisis began to show in Asia towards the end of last year. John Kemp, a Reuters energy analyst, describes the emergency there as a shock similar to Britain’s terrible winter of 1947 or the oil crisis of 1973: a sudden event that exposed deeper structural problems. Pakistan warned of a ...”

“... with Harold Macmillan. I thought him the most influential of Tory backbenchers, more so than Major Morrison, the bucolic chairman of the 1922 Committee, or buffoons like Gerald Nabarro. After the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, when Macmillan was panicked by a typical Rab Butler indiscretion into sacking the dead wood in his Cabinet, Deedes was brought ...”

“... Hamburg’s ruling Senate upheld a nightwatchman model of the state which had more affinities with John Bright’s Manchester than the Kaiser’s Berlin. And Pettenkoferian miasmatism was its medical equivalent: men and miasmas met in the marketplace of the environment. Prudent individuals who took precautions would probably survive. Evans is not suggesting ...”

“... One of the more extraordinary revelations in A Better Class of Person, the first volume of John Osborne’s memoirs, was the fact that the author was proposed as the leading man in the 1948 film The Blue Lagoon. The teenage Osborne by his own account had a hollow chest and acne, and a loin cloth would not have shown these off to advantage; the opportunity to loll among the palms with Jean Simmons went to the Welsh actor Donald Houston ...”

“... centrality in British culture. Characteristically feeble echoes of this assault were evident in John Major’s recent sneering at ‘progressive theorists’, but some years ago the real emotional dynamic was laid bare, indecently bare, by (as usual) Norman Tebbit, who extolled ‘the man in the pub’ against the upper-class ‘cocktail set’ on the ...”

“... they used to be’ section): ‘That an increasing number of young men from Eton and the other major public schools should have done things like photography, interior decoration, or art-dealing in preference to the traditional service careers was to a certain extent the result of Britain’s withdrawal from India and other dependencies overseas ...”

“... activity on the London literary scene that month, for at an institution in Lincoln’s Inn Fields John Thelwall was lecturing to a much less respectable audience on Shakespeare and Dr Johnson. It has become an orthodoxy of literary history that there was a phenomenon called ‘Romantic Shakespearean criticism’, that it was a way of reading which especially ...”

“... John Betjeman was the voice of postwar Englishness: at best, humorous, quirky and enthusiastic about some of the oddest things; at worst, parochial and smug shading into bitter. How ironic, in view of later developments and the argument of Timothy Mowl’s book, that Nikolaus Pevsner’s first visit to England, in 1930, was to research a new topic: Englishness in art ...”

“... Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, after appalling suffering during the past forty years, are the major recruiting ground for international terrorism,’ and ‘Dr Henry Kissinger and many other experts have been right to point out in recent days that in the list of governments supporting international terrorism, Gaddafi comes pretty low down.’ If he ...”

“... demise cost him not only a substantial amount in death duties but also any further hope of major ministerial advancement. The road had stopped short for the Wigan peer. ‘Bal’, as he was known to friends who knew better than to confuse him with Albert Ballin, compiled 54 ornately-bound volumes of diaries, which his son eventually entrusted to ...”