“... like shepherds over their flocks, supplying their every need. Christians are apt to think of the Lord Our Shepherd as a kindly creature, forgetting that shepherds, too, have to eat, but in another of Plato’s reflections on the Golden Age the sinister hints become more obvious. Socrates has been describing a rather minimalist Eden in the early years of ...”

“... of frenzied activity. The scene in Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade in which Lord Raglan and his party view the charge from a nearby hilltop is (perhaps deliberately) very like watching the making of a film. The terminology of film – ‘cut’, ‘shoot’, ‘action’, ‘reload’ – is the terminology of battle and it is a battle ...”

“... state. In those years they flew high over the more typical officers of British Intelligence at home and abroad, whose natural sympathies were right-wing, and who tended to side politically with Hitler and Mussolini rather than with anything which stank of Communism. Surprisingly quickly, after the war, the enemy changed. Suddenly Germany and Italy were ...”

“... which is that dark clouds were gathering, or, as he puts it, ‘bigger and darker birds had come home to roost by the turn of the decade – and with an ominously settled air as though, like the Tower ravens, they intended to stay with us longer than just overnight.’ In effect, back to the Thirties. It had to be so, if you think about it. The Thirties ...”

“... career as a novelist. The very title reminds us he was a Victorian, only two years younger than Lord Alfred Douglas. His most celebrated novels of English life were published in the 1930s. Then he moved to Wales, became very Cymric, historical and metaphysical; a sage, visited by disciples, he wrote of mysteries and antiquities until his death, aged 91, in ...”

“... against the power of the towns and the fiscal authorities. It was not the squire but the second-home owner whom the peasants hated – one might say, especially if he worked for Whitehall. Sidelights on this story come from all directions. Ladurie notes that French customs of inheritance are almost wildly variable, but have been recorded in great detail in ...”

“... Soror ...’, first written in 1925 at the age of 21, she now says that ‘I feel as completely at home with this story as if the idea for it had come to me this morning.’ ‘Anna, Soror ...’ is set in the grim fortress of Castel Sant’ Elmo in 16th-century Naples, and tells of the growth of an incestuous passion between the son and daughter of the prison ...”

“... first and barely made it through to lunchtime: they scored 52 in all, the fewest runs ever in a home Test (46 from the bat; the splendid Ray Lindwall 6 for 20). The Australian openers were past this shameful mark inside the hour. Don Bradman wasn’t needed until after tea, when he came emotively in at his usual first wicket down. Because he had said that ...”

“... self-hatred, Bobby is entrapped into firebombing a supposed Nazi headquarters. Longing for a ‘home’ among the Jews, Bobby allows his Irish partner, his only ‘family’, to be gunned down by a black drug lord – only to discover that the old Jewish woman whose murder has led him astray was killed by black ghetto ...”

“... On the campaign trail he played up his admiration for British values and backed the cause of Irish Home Rule, garnering the support of Irish MPs. Patel shows us how Naoroji painstakingly formed relationships with influential figures in the Liberal Party, including the ageing John Bright and the anticolonial poet Wilfrid Blunt. He forged links with women’s ...”

“... with the notion of conquest by overwhelming foreign force one that came uncomfortably close to home. The armoured units began to take their oaths elsewhere, and over the following decades Yadin’s version of the Masada myth was picked apart. One difficulty was his interpretation of the archaeological remains. Even he didn’t insist that the potsherds ...”

“... that comes from having had a glittering career at the forefront of tearful simplicity. ‘Good Lord,’ she says of AnnieLee, now singing for beers and fries at the Cat’s Paw Saloon, ‘that girl’s so gorgeous she could sing like a barn cat in heat and folks’ll be calling her the next Maria Callas.’AnnieLee goes back to her alter ego’s mansion in ...”

“... Justice we are even given a ‘black smudge of pubic hair’ – but they still feel more at home grousing about the lower orders or condemning as racist the charge that the Metropolitan Police Force is institutionally racist. One might define fiction as the kind of writing in which it is impossible to tell the truth and very hard to make a mistake. If ...”

“... will be locked up in the hands of [the booksellers], the Tonsons and Lintots of the age,’ Lord Camden explained, ‘till the public become as much their slaves, as their own hackney compilers are.’ The power that the intellectual property regime gave to trade privileges, at the expense of royal privileges, seemed to degrade the nobility of ...”

“... Hansford Johnson – caught, to begin with, in the unselfconscious prose of her adolescent Boots Home diaries, 8” x 5”, a week to a spread – gives us privileged entry into the textures and flavours of a vanished time, the nuances of its class structure and language. You might have guessed that a girl in the 1920s and early 1930s could have ‘a topping ...”