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“... and management in Parliament and a huge and dubious fortune as paymaster during the Seven Years War, and yet nursed and passed on to his son a grievance against George III for refusing him the additional reward of an earldom. Before he was well into his twenties, Fox, following in his father’s footsteps as a government supporter, had taken the Commons by ...”

“... T.P. Valera, who joins a gang of motorbike-riding Futurists as a young man in pre-First World War Rome. (Their stories are told in parallel.) Like Reno, he knows that a bike is about more than just speed. Recalling a girl he once liked being whisked off on an older boy’s motorbike, Valera remembers her ‘delicate feminine foot that had been carried ...”

“... in the Observer then; Peter Hennessy could recall nothing on this scale since ‘the cross-party war cabinet in 1940’; and Jackie Ashley thought Brown’s early success showed ‘how deeply he can reach into Tory England’. By September last year, however, Martin Kettle was summing up how little it had all amounted to: ‘Brown is going down fighting. But ...”

“... Bob Scribner’s lucid and depressing paper on the German left-wing historiography of the Peasant War of 1524-5, traditionally a highly politicised subject. More depressing, perhaps, than it need be, since the author pays little attention to the left-wing historians who have quietly, though not crucially, contributed to the modern study of the ...”

“... of the same universities he frequented first as student and later as guest lecturer. During World War One he was a Princeton undergraduate (as I was almost fifty years later) with F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop, at a time of what seems now like relatively uncomplicated Wasp hegemony there and in the arts generally. His ties with that university ...”

“... How unfair to suggest that they were small fry, dilettanti, wartime temporary agents or upper-class decadents. Blunt, in particular, he praises as an agent of a supreme professionalism and commitment, with Driberg, an alleged treble agent, winning a proxime accessit for stamina and for knowledge of human frailty, and Burgess wins commendation for skill in ...”

“... as a high-school student, to find references in old Tulsa newspapers on microfilm to a ‘race war’ he knew nothing about. He pursued the subject in a senior thesis at Reed College in faraway Oregon and in graduate school at Duke in not much closer North Carolina. In 1982 he published Death in a Promised Land, a pioneering account that remains the ...”

“... produced by the Polish Film Unit, which operated out of London in the later years of the war. Other films made by the unit were unambiguously propagandist: documentaries about Polish soldiers and pilots stationed in Britain, happily integrated, sharing in the Allied war effort. The Eye and the Ear is an ...”

“... willing, too, to throw the old values into the pot and take a world-historical punt. The Falklands War was an exemplary gamble and the gaming instinct played a bigger part than Marquand acknowledges in the story that followed on. Like Native Americans, we now have a thriving casino culture and perhaps our island reservation hasn’t done as badly as he ...”

“... of Grade II listed, high-end business offices for rent. But in the late 1960s, during the Vietnam War, this elegant Georgian building housed, among other tenants, the Royal Asiatic Society, as well as my own London ‘station’ on the underground railway for escaping GI deserters. We were breaking the law, under the US Uniform Code of Military Justice and ...”

“... prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. This is the book – Satantango, Melancholy, War and War and Baron. This is my one book.He was speaking of Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, about a man who returns in old age to his provincial Hungarian town, which had just been published in English. When Thirlwell ...”

“... overall growth rates, it was with the recession of 1973-74 that the surge after the Second World War gave way to deceleration across the wealthy world. Intellectually, Milton Friedman’s Nobel Prize of 1976 signalled the shift from Keynesianism to monetarism; thereafter orthodox economics was more concerned with low inflation than full ...”

“... to explain that JFK was also a cheat, who faked authorship of his books and lied over Cuba and his war record, and a tireless philanderer. This discrepancy is due, he writes, to the ‘myths and fabrications which have been popularised by courtiers and toadies like Arthur Schlesinger’, whom he refers to as ‘a sycophant’. He is similarly tough with ...”

“... and Forties as it did to the willingness of graduates to put themselves forward. Lots of working-class people were genuinely grateful that well-to-do young men and women with fancy accents and even fancier academic distinctions were prepared to commit themselves to the creation of a truly classless society. And quite right, too. But times have ...”

“... the forty years of his life. Born a Copt in predominantly Muslim Egypt and into a wealthy class at a time of socialist revolution, and educated at an English school at a time of national revival, he was also the one penniless member of a very rich family. ‘Ram’, the protagonist of Beer in the Snooker Club, has a very similar background and ...”