“... not only lent status to the Party; they also helped to radicalise it. There had been much reading in jail – everything from Rousseau to Marx to Foucault. Politically aware and streetwise, the new activists threw themselves into a re-organisation of the Party at every level. They campaigned about prison conditions, security issues, the ...”

“... marriage in 1950 hardly helped his self-confidence, and Evans’s account of it makes for painful reading. Hobsbawm had married Muriel Seaman, a fellow communist he had met at the LSE. He knew she was ‘not ideal’ but had ‘got used to her’; grading as usual, he hoped she’d ‘soon be very good’. Fatally, he tried to turn her into an intellectual ...”

“... the first in August 1597, the second two in 1598 (‘the only instance except that of Pericles’, Peter Ure has observed, ‘of a Shakespearean quarto going into two editions in the same year’). The success of a play in print did not necessarily betoken success on the stage. Even so it would be surprising to find a member of Shakespeare’s company speaking ...”

“... far than Los Angeles in the past and Athens in the future as a venue for the Olympics,’ stated Peter Warren, Lee Valley’s head of corporate marketing. Lee Valley’s Strategic Business Plan (2000-10) is preparing the ground for change and innovation. ‘The Leisure Centre is an ageing building over 25 years old and the whole complex is subject to ...”

“... whirl, it didn’t seem to matter that he wasn’t settling down. He was enjoying himself, and reading a lot and making friends. In biographies of the period, a group photograph of famous faces will look out at us, and there will be a round cheery figure behind horn-rimmed glasses, and the caption, ‘Unidentified’. Esmond splashed out on the ...”

“... to the support network naturally available to ‘a public school man’. It would be an obtuse reading to see in this some sort of criticism on Waugh’s part of a corrupt social order: the precondition of the comedy is an ostentatious refusal to engage in such humdrum ethical judgment. Grimes is scandalous but he has an indefatigableness which, in the ...”

“... of the present is an unproductive use of leisure time – since what we’re talking about here is reading for pleasure. But the fact is that Allingham and Sayers, both better writers than Christie, are more likely to break the containment field of the detective genre, in ways that end up distracting you or putting you off their books. I came across another ...”

“... what they regard as his infatuation with the upper classes. Ever since J.B. Priestley, after reading A Handful of Dust, gave him the patronising advice to ‘leave the world of society light-weights’, critics have lamented his snobbery. Wodehouse never asked us to take the Drones Club seriously. Why then should we admire the members of Brats? Many ...”

“... he mentions a novel he found ‘delightful’, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. After reading the essay Stevenson spent the next several days writing a reply – ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ – which appeared in a later issue of Longman’s. He wanted to speak about critical and rhetorical matters, and had planned a series of London lectures, if ...”

“... at some of the A-list names cropping up regularly in All We Know: Maude Adams (the first Peter Pan); the Russian film star Alla Nazimova (a teetering Salomé in the ultra-campy cinematic 1923 version of Wilde’s play); Isadora Duncan, the bisexual modern dancer; the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and her Broadway-producer lover Bessie ...”

“... and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this kind of writing. There, British power was too close at hand. It generated another set of forms ...”

“... than any it had constructed since the end of the Second World War, occupying an area the size of Reading. It has now handed Camp Bastion over to the Afghan military which, at the time of writing, was struggling to prevent it being overrun by attackers. Everything the military did depended on the petrol, diesel and kerosene trucked in from Central Asia or ...”

“... fashion. We were thought to take after our fathers, who venerated Magnus Magnusson and Peter Jay, anybody who looked like the besuited officials that a century of colonial education had taught them to defer to. On Friday nights, when many teenagers were out necking bottles of cheap cider or haggling for lovebites in discos, we would be at home ...”

“... Simon Kirby, who was in charge of major projects (including huge station renewals at Birmingham, Reading and London Bridge), and Tom Kelly, a communications strategist versed in the dark arts – he was Alistair Campbell’s successor at Number Ten. Higgins undertook a review of the project and the results, in the form of a new document, HS2 Plus, were ...”

“... one beside the town hall and a second several blocks west. ‘At about 7.30,’ one of them, Peter Blake, remembered, ‘a roar went through the crowd, emanating from the rear. People turned and looked westwards down the street. I saw, to my amazement, a coach being driven fast straight into the back of the crowd. It was a private coach, an ordinary ...”