“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Long ago, with his first collection, In a Green Night (1962), he stated his aims in the poem ‘As John to Patmos’, and again in ‘Islands’: O slave, soldier, worker under red trees sleeping, hear What I swear now, as John did: To praise lovelong, the living and the brown ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... chronicles with an uncharacteristic lack of curiosity the hesitancy of the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, to strike quickly and hard at the BUF. He records a paper submitted by Anderson to Cabinet a few days before regulation 18B was made, arguing that drastic action was premature, and he quotes the Cabinet minute of the ensuing discussion, which ...”

“... but many other sorts of workmen, will put in for, and get the prize.’ (Boyle’s supporter John Wallis retaliated by openly sneering at Hobbes’s plebeian-sounding surname.) Shapin and Schaffer were quickly led to realise that much wider issues were at stake in the controversy than merely the status of experiment. ‘Testifying’ about experiments to ...”

“... of Ford. It wasn’t until he became Bascombe, the sportswriter, that Ford turned himself into a major novelist. At odd moments in The Sportswriter, Frank looks back on his abandoned literary career. He had published a ‘promising’ collection of stories, Blue Autumn, and had then started on a novel which he never finished. It was going to be about an ...”