“... tradition. The first regards Labour as standing for and responsible to an industrial working class organised by its own institutions, particularly the trade unions. It endows that class, rather as Marxism does, with a unique, possibly predetermined, place in human development but sees it, nonetheless, as surrounded by ...”

“... near his prey, missed and was mauled. Charles, having lost an arm and won an MC in the First World War, was felled by an angry buffalo in Tanganyika in 1928. Grey’s remaining brother, Alexander, a vicar in Trinidad, died aged 44, probably from the after-effects of a childhood cricket injury.Biographers of Grey, including the latest, Thomas Otte, have taken ...”

“... Again and again, I was reminded of Reconstruction in America, the traumatic aftermath of the Civil War. Here again was a sullen, defeated society. There had been no gunfire, but West Germany felt as victorious as the American North must have done in 1865. Here once more came the carpetbaggers, smart operators from Frankfurt or Düsseldorf pouring into East ...”

“... surrounded and led to the end of the Habsburg dynasty. Well before the outbreak of the First World War the empire had been put under immense strain by many other contenders for power. On one side was a cluster of embryonic nations that were less and less willing to tolerate their subaltern status within the sprawling, broken-backed, multinational, imperial ...”

“... about the matter of Britain. As Thomas Dilworth documented in his earlier David Jones in the Great War (2012), Jones saw more active service than any other British writer, all of it as a private, and outlived nearly all his contemporaries, with the exception of Robert Graves, born in the same year, 1895. The postwar life has its doldrums, and for a biographer ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... long after the medical fallacies on which they had been built were exploded. In times of world war the inland spas have proved a national asset: in 1939, for instance, the residue of hypochondriacs was tossed on to the street overnight and the hotels were stuffed with refugees from Whitehall. Where else could Fuel Controllers and Wool Controllers have been ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a betrayal of the country. Kim Philby, who actually did set out to betray a country as well as a class, was also strikingly disloyal to his friends (though they, almost irrespective of politics, seem to have been loyal to him). In order for Forster’s Choice to come up in your own life, you must be able to plead that there is something tremendously the ...”

“... of Just William, and racy novels featuring the tragic adventures of slim, persecuted, upper-class, ‘devilishly boyish’ heroines. Much of this was, of course, an endless rehashing of her own grudges and fantasies, but the prime motive was cash. Gyp (as she became in 1883) often repeated that it was hack work, dashed off at maximum speed and with ...”

“... resounding and sudden; in South Asia, Pakistan (marginalised and nearly abandoned by post-Cold War politics) has been veering between being a frail democracy and becoming a basket case. In no obvious way connected to all this, a handful of Anglophone writers has recently been emerging from that country. Most of them are young, and have written one or two ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”