“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The Great War was the war of the great war poets. Was ‘the war to end all wars’ also the war to end all war poetry? The best part of Jon Stallworthy’s introduction to his Oxford Book of War Poetry is a discussion of the chivalric ideal in the British public school classes of the 19th century ...”

“... and Beit Nouba) had stood until 1967. They were destroyed in that year’s war by the democracy’s army, who also put roadblocks around their perimeter and planted a forest where the streets had been, just to make sure the people who’d lived there wouldn’t be able to come back one day to perform their democratic duty. It was a ...”

“... is recycled from a novel by the great Prussian novelist Fontane. His storm was the Napoleonic war, hers is the Second World War. All the male members of her family perished in it, some at the front, others because they took part in the July conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. She herself helped to plan some of the local ...”