“... the 1940s were the end of the 1930s.’ He had a rather anti-climactic war, serving in the Fire Service in North London until 1944 when he was recruited to the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office (which had the great advantage that he could once again ‘lunch in town’). Like many of those who were at the time called, not always ...”

“... creating unity; only its content was different. Two of Durkheim’s followers, the anthropologists Robert Hertz and Arnold Van Gennep, provide Ben-Amos with the narrative for the ‘Culture’ section. Hertz argued that the death of an individual was the death of a social being and thus a blow to the social order. The community healed this wound by means of ...”

“... all, railways never set out to be ‘atmospheric’, but to perform a valuable and profitable service; they can survive and flourish only by adaptation, for they belong to the future as well as the past. The peculiarity of the railways in the country that invented them is that everyone involved can claim to be playing a heritage role, whatever they ...”

“... as, for example, in his demonstration in the House of Commons after the assassination of the Rev. Robert Bradford and his subsequent call for a campaign of passive disobedience to force the British out. Of necessity, the leap of faith is informed or sustained by an idea of martyrdom. Paisley comments that Christ makes frequent references to his death as ...”

“... as a result of the volume of sabre-rattling or the onset of war with Iran; a decision to sack Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating meddling in the 2016 election; a shutdown of the federal government to extort funds for the wall with Mexico; a sudden intensification of the president’s attacks on his political enemies and accusers in ...”

“... was first identified, a group of writers that included Amis, Larkin, Wain, Donald Davie, Robert Conquest and others. As J.D. Scott put it in the baptismal piece in the Spectator, ‘The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible.’ Amis in particular had, as a later ...”

“... Mobutu, probably recruited by Devlin at the end of the 1950s. Mobutu was already in the service of Belgian intelligence and working as a journalist in Brussels. Devlin took a liking to him: he was intelligent, ambitious and charming. More important, Mobutu had met Lumumba in 1959 in Ibadan, at a conference sponsored by the Congress for Cultural ...”

“... recurred every time he seemed ready to go back. In spring 1918 he was about to return to active service when he heard that everyone in his battalion had been killed or taken prisoner at the Chemin des Dames. He went straight back to hospital and was finally discharged in October 1918. ‘He was not malingering,’ Humphrey Carpenter writes in his ...”

“... window, the latest (and no more pleasing than the rest) glimpsed at Paul Scofield’s memorial service in St Margaret’s, Westminster. For all that, though, the book is immensely readable, drawing together so many strands of the artistic life in the 1930s and 1940s – K. Clark, Ben Nicholson, Betjeman and all the stuff to do with the genesis of the Shell ...”

“... and the modern political party was his home. Others, like the Italian sociologist Robert Michels, argued further that for the modern politician the political party was a form of social mobility, so that eventually the protection of the party’s bureaucratic structures – the machine – became more important than the interests of the people ...”

“... When, as a vaguely anti-authoritarian ex-service undergraduate, I first studied Herodotus seriously in the years immediately following the Second World War, my overriding impression was of a man both broad-minded and cosmopolitan; fascinated by the infinite varieties of human nature; surprisingly alert to the influence of women in history, which I’ve always thought of as the subtext, by no means always sexual, of so much public action; appreciative of thaumata, marvels, wherever they might be found (parallels with the New World suggested themselves); and open-minded about religion ...”

“... One day it will find a voice, but the fact that the ruling ANC has never unequivocally disavowed Robert Mugabe’s ‘fast-track land reform’, a land grab in all but name, isn’t reassuring. South Africa – more populous, urbanised and industrialised, among many other differences – is certainly not Zimbabwe, but Zimbabwe was the South Africa of the ...”

“... Walter and especially Hilda inclined to plain living, high thinking and a strong sense of public service. Steven, the younger of their two sons, followed his brother, Leslie, to Eton, where he was a contemporary and friend of Eric Blair. In later life he was much irritated by questions from the compilers of the ‘Orwelliad’, as he called them, asking him ...”

“... of the moon (which is not to say that their astronomy wasn’t for the most part developed in service of celestial divination). Babylonian astrology/astronomy (the two cannot be separated) was communicated to Hellenistic Greece in the third and second centuries BC, and that inheritance shaped the European astronomical enterprise for the next two thousand ...”

“... Sontag cited were so powerfully composed that they attained iconic status almost instantly: Robert Capa’s photograph from 1936 of a Spanish Republican fighter, arms flung out as a bullet hits him (that the photo may have been staged doesn’t alter its influence); or the image, taken in Vietnam in 1972 by the AP photographer Nick Ut, of terrified ...”