“... are the few Englishmen in British India who gave aid to nationalists or Communists. One of them, Michael Carritt, has written a light-hearted account of his brief career in the Indian Civil Service.4 At vastly greater risk, a few Frenchmen in Algeria gave aid secretly to the rebels. Admirable too, though unlikely to be admired by Tories or Reaganites, is the ...”

“... give himself. He always stopped. He wouldn’t quite go over the top,’ Robert Tear thinks, and Michael Tippett speaks wistfully of Britten’s ‘immense possibilities’. Those possibilities were abundantly evident from the start. The young Britten was a musical prodigy who poured out music in an unstaunchable flood, music which showed him, as a ...”

“... Novelists with clear literary pedigrees now write SF regularly: Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Kazuo Ishiguro. Authors who began inside the SF ghetto have found success outside it: J.G. Ballard as an author of realist novels, Samuel Delany in academia, William Gibson, Lethem himself (whose first books owed a lot to Dick). The sciences ...”

“... party that our parents were insistent should not include the children from the terraced houses,’ Michael Burns wrote, recalling VE Day celebrations in Tolworth near Kingston. And it was much the same eight years later in New Malden at the Coronation festivities (‘They’re much too posh for street party’ was the headline in the People). If there is a ...”

“... because they assumed he was a semi-Fascist ultra like themselves. But, as the Cambridge historian Michael Postan put it, ‘They are such fools: they thought they were electing a Tory and never realised that they were electing a Whig.’ Mrs Thatcher imagined that the scholar who had written The Last Days of Hitler would share her hostility to a reunified ...”

“... so much so that R. doesn’t even see the queen, though she’s distinctive enough, dressed in white and glittering with jewels, determinedly animated and smiling, which, since she’s been at it for two hours already, is an achievement in itself. We go on through the rooms, talking to all sorts of people – Jim Naughtie, Nigel Slater and David Hare, who ...”

“... your life culturally reflected, it may become the template for adult aesthetic experience. The white suburban boy-child of the 1950s playing cowboys and Indians could invisibly rehearse all-male dramas. The one who got excited when the Indians won was already on the path to dissidence. There’s one cultural artefact discussed in the book that isn’t an ...”

“... speech to excoriate Kinnock for his pusillanimity. A future Labour government had waved the white flag before it had even arrived in office: ‘Exposed to the threat of nuclear blackmail,’ she told the conference, ‘there would be no option but surrender.’ She contrasted the weakness of Kinnock’s position with that of more robust Labour ...”

“... human life could find rebirth and transformation, 2001 was a natural successor to the black and white projection of the way this world would end. Dr Strangelove was still showing in second-run theatres soon after I learned about the effects just one hydrogen bomb would have, but what struck me then was not the political warning so much as the strange ...”

“... you will not be astonished to learn, was ‘grey’ in the opinion of the Bundys.)Now, I know that Michael Ignatieff was aware of the existence of the above correspondence at least a year ago. And I also urged Bird to send it to him. But the Vietnam drama takes up less than a page of his biography, and mentions Berlin’s real positions not at all. We are ...”

“... and victimhood, drew more than a hundred thousand people who broadly share the idea that innocent white Britons are oppressed, silenced, cheated and disrespected by a malign, power-wielding coalition of immigrants, non-white natives, perverts, vax maniacs, corrupt officials, crooked politicians, Marxists, gender heretics ...”

“... Being laid back about being laid was de rigueur.’ Suu, as she was known, wore tight white jeans, made a fool of herself punting, had her heart broken by a dashing Pakistani, and experimented with alcohol, once and once only, in the lavatory of the Bodleian. But ‘by the popular morality of the time Suu was a pure Oriental ...”

“... as a Momentum branch flag and a ‘Women for Corbyn’ banner. The crowd was largely young and white, but there was an older generation too – veterans of the struggle. Behind me a young man who had come with his mother dipped into a Waitrose bag and – perhaps eager to pre-empt the charge of champagne socialism – produced a mini bottle of ...”

“... the people. In his book, more a synthesis of published material than the product of new research, Michael Sheridan suggests that accounts of these years remain open to some doubt. The adolescent Xi is said to have spent his evenings reading Marx and making repeated attempts to join the party. Sheridan doesn’t see how The Communist Manifesto can have ...”

“... Vauxhall. When he turned to me, I noticed how mottled the irises of his eyes were, how patches of white and light grey jostled for space on them in such a way as to give him a look of shock and bewilderment. He wore one of the longest coats I’ve ever seen; it went all the way down, ending on top of a yellowish pair of sandshoes. His face was full of ...”