“... his account of English constitutional history. But in telling the story of the English monarchy, David Starkey found no occasion even to mention Cromwell’s name.* Now, with the publication of Robert Hutchinson’s biography of Cromwell, it is as if Beria has come back to haunt us, requiring a further revision of the Encyclopedia. And the analogy is not so ...”

“... took himself off to the Normandy coast, where he was amused to find the hotel full of ‘very young rosy-faced English officers on leave with nice young French ladies who clumsily pretend in broken English to be their wives’. This ‘bon ville’ was Cabourg, Proust’s Balbec. Channon dined with Princesse ...”

“... house. Within hours of her murder Tony Blair spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few ...”

“... we are about to set off for the crematorium in the pouring rain when as we turn the car round a young pheasant skitters across the road. Nothing unusual in that except that this pheasant is pure white. I’m not given to a belief in signs or portents but it’s nevertheless quite cheering to feel that she’s still around. The service in the village church ...”

“... towards the end of his long life. On one occasion he told me, as he told many people, that as a young man he had danced with a friend of his mother who, in her own youth, had danced with Prince Albert. He seemed slightly disconcerted when I insisted that he dance a few steps with me so that I could say I had danced with a man who danced with a girl who ...”

“... to the rubbish bin – and so it was a great deal easier, after the failure of the Camp David summit last July, to claim, as Clinton and Barak have done, that the Palestinians were to blame for the impasse, rather than the Israelis, whose position remains that the 1967 territories are not to be returned. The US press has referred again and again to ...”

“... German authors who are a little in love with the English, more particularly a certain kind of young Englishman of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely reciprocated by English authors, goes back at least to the time of Herder and ...”

“... lay with those of their contemporaries who tried to continue some form of modern classicism – David Wild, John Winter, David Chipperfield, Tony Fretton, Georgie Wolton (an exceptionally rare woman in this group), the partnership of Alan Colquhoun and John Miller. In the 1970s and 1980s most of these could be found ...”

“... clips with rapid scene cuts and thumping soundtracks, usually portraying the ‘journeys’ of young people like Ahmed, as well as providing practical advice on how to handle everything from buy-to-let mortgages to capital gains tax. Ahmed says that his audience ranges from university students to millennials in their late thirties or early ...”

“... thoroughly influenced by, Blunt’s contempt for the Levantine ‘Gosmoboleet’. Lawrence, the young archaeologist saturated with Burton, Palgrave and Doughty, became obsessed with the idea, first mooted by Blunt, of an Arab empire headed by the Hashemite clan. The unfortunate ‘Gosmoboleets’ and ‘bastard Irakis’ had the Sherif Hussein’s sons ...”

“... portray the Zionist pioneers waging a war of independence against the British oppressor. Jon and David Kimche provided a good example of the conventional Israeli analysis of British policy in Both Sides of the Hill: Britain and the Palestine War (1960). ‘It was a mixture of ignorance, blundering, indecision and local bias against the Jews, encouraged by ...”

“... against ‘80,000 incorrigible Jacobins’ he was thinking not of the popular societies but of the young radical intelligentsia of Britain. These were the students, young attorneys, merchants’ sons and daughters, who signalled their advanced views by changes in dress and hair-style, in education and child care and ...”

“... 200 billion dollars . . . And we’re paying the highest price in the loss of the lives of our young soldiers – almost alone. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message. In a world of instant projections and medium-is-the-message contemplations, commentary on the presidential race of 2004 might finish right there: Kerry’s style is ...”

“... afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost erotic.Eno’s young life was lived between flat countryside and the beckoning sea, but he had other horizons too: Catholicism (he attended the Convent School of Jesus and Mary in Ipswich and his confirmation name was St Jean-Baptiste de la Salle); imported American music ...”

“... and Gwen Williams’s cottage, where Raymond grew up. Assembled in the churchyard, ‘Raymond’s young men’ (as his wife, Joy, used to call them) are now middle-aged and showing signs of wear and tear, ‘thinning and unkempt hair ... a bad back here, a heavy paunch there’. Sartorially, they are drabbies, ‘awful old grey suits and worse black ties ...”