“... went out the window,’ Pete Beale observes, ‘when the Tories come in.’ Pauline’s husband, Arthur, has just been made redundant – the only thing getting in the way of their happiness at the prospect of a new child. ‘That cow at Number Ten,’ her mother elaborates, is the one to blame. (EastEnders may well have played its part in provoking the ...”

“... unideological, rational approach to the ills of the body, both social and individual. It was, in Max Weber’s sense, ‘a calling’, a secular equivalent to being chosen by God for his purposes. Germany’s Jews embraced this calling: at the beginning of the 19th century, perhaps 2 per cent of German doctors were Jews; by the early 20th century, at a time ...”

“... became a catchphrase. By Christmas 1939, a comedy revue had opened at the Holborn Empire starring Max Miller and called, simply, Haw-Haw; there were dozens of stage acts, impersonators and songs (‘And yet in the winter it’s rather pathetic/ He’s frozen to death, ‘cause his pants are synthetic/Lord Haw-Haw, the Humburg of Hamburg,/The comic of eau de ...”

“... Brough and showered him with childish insults. But he was able to bring on a troop of co-stars – Max Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie Jacques, not to mention the pre-teen Julie Andrews – without ever being upstaged. In performance he would ...”

“... you off their books. I came across another example of the broken containment field in the work of Arthur Upfield, who wrote a series of novels in the 1930s and onwards featuring an indigenous Australian detective, Bony, short for Napoleon Bonaparte. Upfield’s masterpiece, The Sands of Windee, is a well-realised and vivid book, and teaches you a lot about ...”

“... millions turned to the spiritualist movement, searching for messages from their lost men.’ Arthur Conan Doyle wrote: ‘I seemed suddenly to see that it was really something tremendous, a breakdown of walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest ...”

“... man who is writing the review!’). Out went Frank Swinnerton, Edmund Blunden, L.A.G. Strong and Arthur Bryant; in came A.L. Rowse, Maurice Richardson, Peter Quennell and Nancy Mitford. More important, it was Connolly who introduced Astor to Orwell, who became his friend and mentor, and whose literary style he so admired that new arrivals on the paper were ...”

“... the importance of unpaid work, most of it done by women. Guy Standing cites the economist Arthur Cecil Pigou and his thought experiment about women and work: ‘If he hired a housekeeper, national income went up, economic growth increased, employment rose and unemployment fell. If he subsequently married her, and she continued to do precisely the same ...”

“... George W. Bush of an intercontinental ‘axis of evil’, now locates evil in the White House. Max Boot, self-declared ‘neo-imperialist’ and exponent of ‘savage wars’, recently claimed to have become aware of his ‘white privilege’. Ignatieff, advocate of empire-lite and torture-lite, is presently embattled on behalf of the open society in ...”

“... of Naples and a considerable journey, by road then sea, to Anzio. Clark kept two fast PT-boats (max speed forty knots) on hand to make the trip, which, under ideal conditions, with even a smooth sea feeling as hard as reinforced concrete beneath one’s spine as the souped-up torpedo boats planed across the water, would still take the best part of two ...”

“... Then she notices that Weevers had mentioned in a letter the name of an Amsterdam dealer called Max Möller, whose shop still exists. Kennedy talks to Möller’s daughter-in-law, who later suggests in an email that Kennedy has the wrong Möller; the cello had probably been sold by Gebrüder Müller. That seems to be the end of the line.Some hours ...”

“... was Clive,’ he was saying, ‘we’ – his wife sitting beside him smiled – ‘we called him Max, a name I came to feel suited him well. It’s not entirely a nice name, not plain certainly or wholesome. In fact Max, really, is the name of a charmer, implying a degree of sophistication, a veneer of social ...”

“... novelist contemporaries. It is true that Gide and Wells and James and Bennett, of course, and also Max Beerbohm, Samuel Butler, Galsworthy, David Garnett, Hardy, Robert Hichens, W.H. Hudson, Lubbock, H. de Vere Stacpoole are mentioned, also Forster’s close friend G.L. Dickinson. Of another, highly gifted friend, Virginia Woolf, he has very little to ...”

“... historical account of the role of intention in justifying political action is the one given by Max Weber in his lecture ‘Politik als Beruf’ (usually translated as ‘Politics as a Vocation’). It was delivered on 28 January 1919 to a group of students in Munich, and Weber used it to warn them, among other things, against politicians who come flaunting ...”