“... as the war starts’ (September 1937); ‘We might as well pack our bags for the concentration camp’ (March 1938); ‘the concentration camp looms ahead’ (November 1938). And there is the fearful vision of Coming Up for Air (June 1939): ‘The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the ...”

“... Murder Mystery) Awake in Spain is a hotchpotch of shepherds, Audenesque pastoral airmen, urban gay camp, Shakespearean aristocrats-in-the-woods and what William Empson called the child-as-swain: TWO SHEPHERDS: We love the country, that’s why we’re handsome, it’s love love love love love. We only quarrel over ...”

“... I remember hearing it when I was in Beirut in 2002, during Israel’s assault on the Jenin refugee camp, and thinking, no, it’s a ruthless, pitiless siege. The use of the word ‘genocide’ struck me then as typical of the rhetorical inflation of Middle East political debate, and as a symptom of the bitter, ugly competition over victimhood in ...”

“... This is From Early Life by the oldest of the five authors, the novelist and scientist ‘William Cooper’: he was born in 1910 and brought up (as Harry Hoff) in the town of Crewe in Cheshire. Seniors in his family were determined chapel-goers, but Cooper-Hoff looks back at his childhood, over eighty years, with the quiet smile of a tolerant ...”

“... When Toho Studios released Gojira in November 1954, Japanese audiences, according to William Tsutsui, watched its scenes of destruction ‘in respectful silence, sometimes leaving the theatres in tears’. Gojira – or Godzilla, as he came to be known in English – was a fire-breathing dinosaur played by a man in a latex suit, but his destruction of Tokyo wasn’t played for laughs ...”

“... In​ 1917, the United States Coal and Coke Company established a mining camp named after the company president, Thomas Lynch, just north of the Cumberland Gap in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of Black Mountain, the highest peak in the state. By the start of the Second World War, more than ten thousand people were living in Lynch, and the mines, which employed four thousand, were among the most productive in the world ...”

“... Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own jokes. Amiable images, devised no doubt to lure us into a placidly ...”

“... values on the Chiltern slopes. The Rothschild estate of Halton was ‘transformed into a vast camp of hutments, which played sad havoc with the beauty of the hillside towards Tring, and this has developed into one of the principal depots of the Royal Air Force.’ Not far away, Hillingdon House became the headquarters of the RAF, Inland Area. Perhaps we ...”

“... death in 1658 – he was the de facto laureate to the new state. He also became tutor to William Dutton, who was a member of Cromwell’s household. At this time Marvell was referred to as ‘a notable English-Italo-Machiavellian’ – for reasons that are mysterious he had the reputation of being a crafty and powerful figure. In 1657 he entered the ...”

“... troops were massing in Scotland or near the Channel. Unfortunately, one of the Garbo spies, ‘William Gerbers’, a Swiss-German businessman, was based in Liverpool, where the real ships and troops were gathering. After the invasion, it would seem suspicious that Gerbers hadn’t reported that troops were gathering on the Mersey en route to Casablanca. So ...”

“... spelled the end of Pan Am, which never recovered from the damage to its reputation. The trial at Camp Zeist was the longest and – at a cost of £75 million – the most expensive in Scottish legal history. The appeal hearing was the first Scottish trial to be broadcast live on both television and the internet. Lawyers, politicians, diplomats and relatives ...”

“... was capable of stripping and repairing most mechanical devices. Indeed, at the Everest base-camp he rebuilt the oxygen apparatus, saving weight and improving the flow. Even then, his revised rig weighed about 30 pounds (say, eight volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica) and the bottles were still unreliable. After two failed attempts on the summit by ...”

“... the concordat that would guarantee continued single-family rule. The interpreter was Colonel William Eddy, a senior US intelligence officer and much else besides. Considered too insecure during the ‘global war on terror’, Suez was rejected as a potential venue for the re-enactment: the grandsons of the two principals and Eddy’s nephew had to make ...”

“... being enlightened as to the advantages he himself enjoyed. When war broke out in 1914, he was in camp with the school cadet corps. Although only 16 at the time, he made an attempt, properly frustrated by the medical officer, to join the Artists’ Rifles. ‘From the vantage-point of the late 20th century,’ the biographer says, ‘his eagerness to plunge ...”

“... for Blunt were predictably more temperate than those who wanted to take away his chair (from this camp came some familiar mythologising about the ‘coldblooded traitor’). It would be interesting to know how many of those who voted for Blunt accepted the opposition’s view that the man’s political past was relevant to his title to a chair. There was some ...”