“... glad as they are that Marxists have abandoned such fatuities as base-superstructure models, it is no news to them that the political and legal powers of the state have an integrity and persistence of their own. Academic historians such as Maurice Cowling and John Vincent have for years been plotting the political seduction ...”

“... years when all Clough’s major poetry was composed – ‘Ambarvalia’, ‘The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich’, ‘Amours de Voyage’ and ‘Dipsychus’. Tom was a favoured confidant. One of Clough’s letters contained an MS version of ‘Say not the struggle nought availeth’, and Tom in large part supplied the model for the hero of ‘The ...”

“... College of Art on a scholarship. After working in the kitchen at the newly opened Royal Festival Hall in 1951 – he’d begun by mopping floors but was soon roped into skinning a heap of sole – he came up with the idea of drawing recipes as cartoon strips. At first these were for personal use only – he didn’t want to spoil his ‘expensive ...”

“... on Christianity. He confesses himself torn over the divinity of Christ, but appears to have no doubt that many of the doctrines preached by the Catholic Church in France were either incredible or wicked or both. Rousseau was, in Emile as elsewhere, hard on the doctrine of Original Sin. It was his lifelong conviction that man came from the hands of God ...”

“... to foster homes in the country was haphazard (‘I’ll take a girl, please – curly hair and no lice’), and mixed in outcome, for both children and hosts. But the bombing didn’t start for another year, after the ‘Phoney War’ had ended. At that point, in 1940, there was further evacuation, overseas to the Dominions. Most of us who were evacuated ...”

“... Museum) and the National Gallery. Piero della Francesca was a figure of special interest for both John Charles Robinson, an agent for South Kensington as well as for private collectors, and Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery, because of the extreme rarity of his portable pictures. There was only one work by him in any public – or ...”

“... men who under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances are compelled to act like heroes. No historical novelist can avoid finding himself in conversation, if not competition, with the writers of the period in which his stories take place. Between 1935 and 1940, Eric Ambler wrote six thrillers in which ordinary men – academics, journalists, language ...”

“... began, in March 2003, the 30-year-old Stewart sent his résumé in to the Foreign Office but got no reply; undaunted, he set off for Baghdad to ask for a job directly. He landed the position of deputy governor for the southern province of Maysan, on the Iran-Iraq border, where he would spend six months before shifting to the dangerous neighbouring province ...”

“... of the Interior, once told FDR. ‘Because I get too hard at times?’ Roosevelt asked. ‘No,’ Ickes replied, ‘because you won’t talk frankly, even with people who are loyal to you.’ Joseph Persico, whose admiration for FDR, like that of many Americans, is close to hero-worship, treats FDR’s endless deceptions and tricks with ...”

“... boom: now it is the epicentre of urban insecurity. The city is familiar with crisis, however, and no one could say it had surrendered to the new and old dangers it faces. Although disaster experts warn that a dirty bomb could result in the evacuation of millions of panicked residents and require the demolition of contaminated buildings and streets, the demand ...”

“... ideas while obscuring his overt possession of them. That he chooses to read a fiction in a lecture hall rather than a lecture enables him to pose the unspeakable instead of talking about the impossibility of speaking it. Last year he and I took part in a conference in Holland on the problem of evil. The participants fumbled around with the primary grotesquerie ...”

“... and emergency midwifery is as wide as a hallway: when things go wrong, they roll you across the hall from the electric-candle-lit midwifery suites into the bright whiteness of the obstetrician-led ward, where they keep the good drugs.Changes in midwifery coalesced around the problem of whether it was possible to practise on the interior of the labouring ...”

“... the belittlement of ‘a very close friend’.Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was published towards the end of 2009, and by 2017 had sold more than 30,000 copies (55,000 and still rising by this March). It was followed in 2014 by Ghosts of My Life, then The Weird and the Eerie (2016). The publishers, Zero Books and, from ...”

“... of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of the Royal Naval College (film set, banqueting hall for hire, weddings a speciality), that is being prepared for its tent-show apocalypse, has never previously been part of the Greenwich story. The peninsula, if you check it out on a 19th-century map, is a vestigial tail, a pre-amputation stump known as ...”

“... seen at first sight’ was another of his aphorisms, one that he borrowed from Gotthold Lessing or John Opie, magpie that he was. ‘Every glance is a glance for study,’ he also said. The scene in Rain, Steam and Speed is of an imminent death, the instant of an action caught by a glance. A train rushes across a bridge and is bearing down on a hare that’s ...”