“... see now because they don’t work here.’ The next morning as T. gets ready for work again, his young son might tell him: ‘No Daddy – no work. Work’s closed. No. Work’s closed.’ T. earns £10.90 an hour, which brings him a salary of £22,105 a year without overtime, a figure above the UK living wage of close to £16,000 but below the median wage ...”

“... are] cowards, loungers, without majesty, without awe, antiquity, foresight, character; old bucks, young bucks, and Biddy Buckskins. He runs on colloquially, ‘talking’ warmly and unselfconsciously. If only his friends could do the same. Since Bridges destroyed his own letters to Hopkins, the new material in this edition – the letters back to Hopkins from ...”

“... into popular use through officialdom – “safari” reports were a regular part of a young Assistant Commissioner’s paperwork – so that by 1905 or so it was colloquial in tiny Nairobi but unknown in London.’ The word became world-famous after 1908 when Teddy Roosevelt, relinquishing his Presidency, decided to hunt in East Africa and put his ...”

“... into the scope of ‘immoral conditions’ in the local community. They recruited from among the young enlisted men stationed at the base a number of sailors who volunteered to serve as decoys and to seek out and identify men they suspected of being sexual perverts. The volunteers agreed to have sex with these men, to infiltrate their social networks, and by ...”

“... yet. Burns himself was never to win through to crazy age, with its ‘something yet’: he died young, at the age of 37 – en poète, as he put it – of a rheumatic affliction of the heart caused or assisted, it would seem, both by work and by drink. So you could say that he was never anything but young, and that his ...”

“... is a close similarity between Wordsworth’s manifesto in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and Edward Marsh introducing the first Georgian anthology in 1912 with the statement that ‘English poetry is once again putting on a new strength and beauty.’ The difference is that Wordsworth really was heralding a new era of sensibility, as Ezra Pound was to do ...”

“... would be enhanced in time for the Nixon-Brezhnev summit. But the plan was excessively vague. Edward Heath was not responsive to the idea of a special relationship with America – he was more interested in cultivating relations with his European allies, especially France; the Germans under Brandt were more concerned with their Ostpolitik; and the French ...”

“... a Boston lawyer and counsel for the army, replied to the ascription of Communist connections to a young lawyer on his staff: ‘Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.’ McCarthyism had been launched in Wheeling, West Virginia only four years earlier, in the speech where the senator claimed to have the ...”

“... opinion, his is the best, and psychologically the most convincing, account of how a well-educated young American of the 1950s and 1960s could think of himself as a ‘liberal’ and still be a committed Cold Warrior. As he says, ‘whether we had a right – any more than the French before us – to pursue by fire and steel in Indochina the objectives our ...”

“... These days Orientalism has a bad name. Edward Said depicted it as a deadly mixture of fantasy and hostility brewed in the West about societies and cultures of the East. He based his portrait on Anglo-French writing about the Near East, where Islam and Christendom battled with each other for centuries before the region fell to Western imperialism in modern times ...”

“... possibly offer anything but a most miserable two hours to millions of happy-minded young Americans’. ‘Let’s try new things by all means,’ Selznick wrote, ‘but let’s keep these gambles within the bounds of those that would be indulged in by rational businessmen.’ Over at MGM, Samuel Goldwyn had made his own calculations, telling ...”

“... a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he shone ...”

“... and Susan Ramsay, the wives of notable future governor-generals, became her ladies-in-waiting. The young Lord Dalhousie organised her first visits outside London. In the years that followed, an increasing flow of petitions came to her and Albert from India, as well as a stream of gifts, both splendid and humble, the latter often handicrafts, which she much ...”

“... should remember the bronze virility’ of Arno Breker’s statues, ‘the browned bodies of young workers’ and ‘the guards mounting watch over the memorial of Nazi martyrdom at Munich’, and reclaim ‘what was positive within the Nazi movement’. Hitler, Knight went on, was a ‘burning positive’ who ‘may have been absolutely needed for ...”

“... Thus Ascherson joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing power of an undemocratic state ...”