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“... to try to say, I ask you to join Iris and me, crossing Devon on a motorbike not long after the war. Empty roads, no crash-helmets. We were going too fast and indulging our childish habit of throwing high-sounding philosophical phrases at each other. (I think this was a hint taken from John Buchan’s autobiography, where he links stretches of countryside ...”

“... than ‘stately’. Clough’s personal battle for demotic regional styles was soon to become a war – with council after council, county after county, and eventually with government – over minimum standards for all council housing. And although I see that both Richard Haslam and Jonah Jones credit him with authorship of the splendidly ...”

“... the reputation of Haig was bound up that of the entire British High Command in the First World War, if not that of the British Army itself and the governing classes from which its senior officers were largely drawn. After the Somme and Passchendaele no one could claim that all was entirely well: but once the war was over ...”

“... of 1915, a disaster in every way, was dreamed up after Turkey sided with Germany in the Great War. Churchill’s cunning plan was to cut through the ghastly stalemate of the Western Front with a morale-boosting attack where Germany expected it least. The idea was to force open the straits between the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara, get to ...”

“... the world, there are still a few reminders of the fact that, between the 1880s and the First World War, Germany, like other major European powers, possessed an overseas colonial empire. If you go to Windhoek in Namibia, you can still pick up a copy of the Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper which caters for the remaining German-speaking residents of the town. If ...”

“... social and moral attitudes of bourgeois lives as seen in an apartment block occupied by the middle class. But Zolaesque naturalism has been out of intellectual fashion for a generation. Although the Condition of England Question does engage the attention of novelists, they approach it with glancing allusiveness, like Martin Amis, or cover it with the cloak of ...”

“... not.’ Freedman’s parents, Jewish refugees who settled in America, told her stories of their war years in London. That aroused her interest. Her next step was a doctoral dissertation at Indiana University, and for this she came to England and interviewed about fifty people who remembered London during the air-raids, ‘focusing on under-represented ...”

“... on guard’ he says of him: Truth’s pedagogue, braving an entrenched class of fools and scoundrels, children of the world, his eyes caged and hostile behind glass – still Péguy said that Hope is a little child. Violent contrariety of men and days; calm juddery bombardment of a silent film showing such things: its canvas ...”

“... defective as these are, they should not, even temporarily, since this isn’t yet the Third World War, be put to the uses of propaganda and professional politics, and it is good that 80 per cent of people don’t want them to be. The ferocity of the assault on the BBC has in one sense been counter-expressive. It has been taken to indicate a split within the ...”

“... to be eaten on their own, belong to this century, even to the period after the Second World War.’ She gives much of the credit for this shift in taste to Elizabeth David, who in the 1950s preached that the fruits of the earth were more than mere adjuncts to flesh. Now the high price of meat is doing Mrs David’s work for her. The campaign has been ...”

“... Of course, Bloomsbury and the Neo-Pagans had much in common: an educated upper middle-class background; Cambridge – almost all the men went there, and some of the women; at Cambridge, the Bloomsbury men mostly belonged to the Apostles, and so did Rupert Brooke and Ferenc Bekassy, a fringe Neo-Pagan; nervous breakdowns were common in both groups ...”

“... world, with Rome anxious to regain its position after a generation of military defeat and civil war. It had lost its unquestioned military supremacy in the Near East, where it was challenged by the revived Sasanian empire of Iran, and along the frontiers of the Rhine and the Danube. Above all, it had lost its nerve. No one quite knew any longer what it was ...”

“... he knows intimately the city where Putin began. Vladimir Putin was born in 1952, to working-class parents who had survived the Leningrad siege. Two older brothers had died in the course of it, and Vladimir was a late, solitary child. Although these were still Stalinist times, his mother ensured that he was baptised (he now wears his baptismal cross ...”

“... it emerged out of the British Empire and out of a cosmopolitan economy, after the Second World War.’ And so, he writes, ‘a British nation was created, by which I mean a distinctive economic, political and social unit within the borders of the United Kingdom.’ This unit, and ‘the internal rebuilding of the nation’, required a decisive rejection of ...”

“... the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) and the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. From fine old buildings in Whitehall, Temple, St James’s Square and the Strand, they shape much of the foreign and defence policy analysis produced in Britain. Each institution has its own flavour (the Chatham House ...”