“... intellectuals were formerly supposed to carry. What is an intellectual? Intellectuals are not a class; they are not by definition significantly political (though the Russians once thought they were); they can’t be relied on to speak truth to power – but they must be something. Collini finds little to interest him in two of the three modern senses of the ...”

“... was about. Taylor’s Bismarck, his Habsburg Monarchy and his famous Origins of the Second World War are all classics, which are regularly reprinted and which have something fresh to say each time you look at them. He was and is a wonderful lecturer. He has combined all of this with a journalistic sideline that would have occupied other men full-time. And ...”

“... Oxford had been followed by a seismic controversy over his book on the origins of the Second World War. I half expected to find a smell of fire and brimstone in the air, and my knees were knocking together as I climbed the last few steps to his rooms in the New Buildings at Magdalen. But there was only the aroma of his pipe tobacco, and some brisk advice on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Elitists are a cheerless class and Vilfredo Pareto was no exception. He certainly led a cheerless life. He gave up a career as an engineer for writing and politics, but although he succeeded Léon Walras to the Chair of Political Economy at Lausanne he never obtained an academic post in Italy itself, and on the two occasions on which he stood for parliament in that country he was defeated (as he saw it) by corruption ...”

“... one could object and say that she never took her prestige and committed it publicly against the war, but still ...It’s annoying to have to call her ‘Jackie’ – nothing is more irritating than the use of celeb nicknames like ‘Di’ and ‘Ollie’ and ‘O.J.’ – but there isn’t much by way of an alternative shorthand. ‘Mrs Kennedy’ won’t ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”