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“... defeated military attempted guerrilla raids from their shelters on the North Downs. Religion was no consolation. Fundamentalist clergy wandered the back roads and river paths between Staines and Richmond, calling for divine retribution. They died raving, in the rubble, doctrine decayed into a stream of incoherent curses. ...”

“... rolled into the square in a blue Bedford van. He came towards the house in the style of someone in no great mood for ice-cream and jelly, and within minutes, having scanned the television pages of the Daily Record, he threw the entire party out of the living room – Jaffa Cakes, Swizzle Sticks, cans of Tizer, the lot – all the better to settle down to a ...”

“... and the Treasury. This person compared the ethos of the Home Office to that of Millwall fans: ‘No one likes us, we don’t care.’ Home secretaries see the world in Hobbesian terms, as a dangerous and frightening place, in which vulnerable people are robbed, murdered and blown up, and these things happen because the state has failed them. What’s ...”

“... and Boon’ was right up my street. Raphael was there, sitting on the floor in the packed main hall of Ruskin College where he taught adult students, amid dozens of historians from both inside and outside the university. He looked like the eternal student himself in jeans and bomber jacket, long hair flopping over his eyes as he smoked a roll-up. ‘A bit ...”

“... enough to trigger compulsory evacuation, he wouldn’t be able to sell up in the normal way; no lender will offer a mortgage on his flat. Only cash buyers will buy unremediated flats, and they can force desperate owners to sell at a big loss. But Morris still has to pay his mortgage. ‘If you add the service charge,’ he said, ‘I’m paying upwards ...”

“... is untrue, but it certainly created a buzz. The play ran for ten consecutive performances – no mean feat in the quick-change repertoire of those days – and the first edition, published in January 1728, sold out in a few weeks. This stir of interest had little to do with Theobald’s reputation as a playwright, which was rather middling: his most ...”

“... period from the birth of Whitman to the death of T.S. Eliot. It could be said that before Whitman, no American poet of real gifts wrote American literature; and after Eliot, none wrote anything else. Between these two points, two cultures, already to different degrees and in different ways interdependent, began to produce a fused, rich and ambiguous ...”

“... expected when an eminent Communist is involved: newspapers are always eager to show that there is no sense of equality or justice among Communists, that they have no difficulty in accepting the idea of élitism (the word springs to mind as soon as the Ecole Normale is mentioned). But it was not inevitable that this terrible ...”

“... had been the chairman of Eurotunnel, was appointed to run the Strategic Rail Authority, created by John Prescott in 1999 to give direction to the privatised industry. Morton commissioned a report from Atkins and Ernst & Young to assess whether there was a need for such a line. By the time they reported in 2003, Morton – who was too outspoken to occupy such a ...”

“... you know,’ he said. ‘Why are you so sure?’ ‘Because I stabbed my wife.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘No, they won’t give it to me.’ He wanted to talk a lot about age and he told me I should look after myself. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘when you get to my age you have to pee a lot. And there is no distance at all between ...”

“... In 1978 Terry Eagleton wrote an essay on John Bayley in the New Left Review. It is a ritual excoriation of that most tactful of ‘liberal humanist’ critics, punctuated with predictable sneers about ‘a view of life from the Oxford senior common room window’ and how Bayley’s criticism prizes a liberal disorder that depends on a conservative order ‘within which the gentleman may wear his art and opinions lightly ...”

“... ago, Elektra Nonesuch – a Time-Warner subsidiary – released their CD of Górecki’s Symphony No 3. At about the same time – on 24 April 1992, to be precise – the city editor of the Daily Mail set his readers ‘two simple questions’: ‘1. Are you in favour of the working classes subsidising the pleasures of the middle classes? 2. Are you in favour ...”

“... and competing political tendencies; between little Englanders (such as Richard Cobden and John Bright) on the one hand and chauvinist imperialists (such as Lord Palmerston and Joseph Chamberlain) on the other; between a maritime and peaceful trading nation and a military-imperial superpower; between a petit-bourgeois electorate, fired by the ...”

“... day. Though the view is that a high poll is a sign of a strong Yes vote, I have a gut feeling – no, more a fear – that the No vote will be mounting up. I place the Yeses at 62 per cent, and feel that Sidney Elliott, a political scientist at Queens University, is too optimistic in predicting 75 per cent. But then I’m ...”