“... in Asia smouldered – in India there was Partition, in Malaya the Emergency, in Burma the civil war – Ceylon became Whitehall’s model for the transfer of colonial power. ‘There was no fight for that freedom which involved a fight for principles, policies and programmes,’ Solomon Ridgeway Bandaranaike, the anti-colonial head of state who took power ...”

“... admission (you can do another language, but hardly anyone does). The Olympic Mathematics Class is popular with primary school pupils who show an early interest in the sciences. In a big city like Shanghai or Beijing, one-to-one maths tutoring for young children can cost 500 RMB per hour (the average wage in big cities is around 50 RMB per hour). As ...”

“... known as the External Names, about thirty thousand families of the English and Scots high middle class. These men and women, presented with losses on underwriting for the years 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1991 many times greater than their investment and even their net worth, have responded in unusual fashion. They have rebelled and many seem bent, Samson-like, on ...”

“... effect – essentially exploitative. And not only in literary terms, since it’s the working-class they’ve always used to demonstrate what it means to be Scottish. One looks for a fresh account, that would try to see working people both as a class and as distinctively Scottish, while freeing that word ...”

“... young man. On his release in 1927 he joined the French Foreign Legion, and during the Second World War is said to have expiated his crime by saving Jews in Marseille from deportation to Auschwitz. Police inquiries soon established that the three young men were part of a much wider conspiracy involving others as young as 16. All of them were from good ...”

“... on the day that Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. Next he is a partisan in the Spanish Civil War. He is present in Moscow in 1957, ‘shocked’ to see that the embalmed Stalin was ‘so tiny and yet so all-powerful’. He is part of ‘the attentive and unquestioning multitudes’ who listen to Fidel Castro for hours on end. He is a deathbed witness to ...”

“... in a fictional (and when Coward wrote it in 1947, immediate) past in which Britain had lost the war and been occupied by the Nazis. Here, the group affected is not a family but the regulars of a London pub, and as the play covers only five years the gaps are shorter. But the fundamental dramaturgical challenges remain the same, and, surprisingly for someone ...”

“... in Zimbabwe of the classic Socialist Realist play, The Kremlin Chimes (‘Love across the class line ... Bolshevik sailor Rybakov proposes marriage to electrical engineer Zabilin’s daughter, Masha’), with Lenin depicted as an all-comprehending, all-wise black man. The play’s furious denunciation of ‘counter-revolutionary Whites’ was ...”

“... to make the final outcome unpredictable. The first phase of Mao’s revolutionary period – the War of Liberation – saw the defeat of feudal and bourgeois China through an armed class struggle, and brought the promise of a new world revolutionary movement led by a close alliance between Beijing and Moscow. The Long ...”

“... survivor’ majority and the ‘healthy breeze-blown’ minority. This group, Scotland’s middle-class professionals, already accustomed to urban life and relatively secure, began to take part in Britain’s most ambitious political and cultural schemes. Empire was one; the expansion of the state after World War Two was ...”

“... but the more one browses the more it is apparent that a double standard is operating. In one class, that of the learned editors, the physicists and the cataract surgeons, the subjects’ private lives are either inviolate, or uninteresting, or unknown (save as may be fallibly deduced from ‘He was unmarried’). The second, smaller ...”

“... provided the ultimate assurance of our national survival. For most of that time, during the Cold War, its purpose was clear, though not without controversy. Today’s world is different. Many of the old certainties and divisions of the Cold War are gone. We cannot predict the way the world will look in 30 or 50 ...”

“... playful connections between the two books. For instance, when he’s 17, at the beginning of the war, Feathers is evacuated, to his desperate shame (he wants to volunteer). In Old Filth, onboard ship, the officers threaten to make him and his friend cook: ‘You couldn’t do worse than this duff.’ In The Man in the Wooden Hat, he reminisces about the duff ...”

“... island’ of Mull suggest ‘living waxworks representing a past stage of the upper-middle class ...’ There are photographs to reinforce such visual impressions. Here and there readers may come on some puzzling terms. They will only gradually discover that a ‘lazybed’ is a trench for planting potatoes in. Agon is a good Greek word, but scarcely ...”

“... from Yeats. ‘Virtuoso vulgarity’ indeed. Amis himself sometimes does a borrowing from high-class literature (‘green and pale’; ‘promise-crammed’; ‘the only end of age’) though always when it means something, and where he charitably supposes a decent reader will know not only what it means but where it came from and why it is worth ...”