“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with Meursault, the murderous colonising other, and soon enough we realise we’re reading both novels at the same time. Like Vendredi, Michel Tournier’s subaltern rewrite of Robinson Crusoe, Meursault, contre-enquête wrests the narrative away from the settler. In his fruitless search through L’Etranger for a sign of his brother’s ...”

“... Worms (1999) looks at the way Freud’s death is narrated in biographies by Ernest Jones and Peter Gay. There are plenty of differences, but both biographers need to see Freud as ‘the master of self-mastery’. Jones in particular, flying in the face of all the psychoanalytic evidence, presents him as ‘a remarkably consistent, heroically unified ...”

“... was the subject of intermittent campaigns. In his 1964 study, The Last Refuge, the sociologist Peter Townsend stressed the frequent affronts to dignity and the lack of privacy and basic sanitary standards afforded to older people. He reserved special contempt for the former workhouses, where inmates wore institutional clothing (sometimes bearing the names ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... life, but if he did, he did it so successfully that his enterprises no longer stand out in relief. Reading these books, I have remembered the reason: it was to do with the way he had supported Mrs Thatcher and, I felt, distorted the democratic process in the 1980s. Now, though, I think Murdoch’s support cuts both ways, and did so even at the time. Page gives ...”

“... intellectual history. Things could only get better, and the first sign that they were doing so was Peter Gay’s magnificent study, The Enlightenment (1966). Not that Gay was unpartisan. He had fled the insanities of Nazi Germany before the war, and his ‘comprehensive interpretation’ of 18th-century thought was in part an expression of gratitude to the ...”

“... much as Forster feared when deploring Gide and Lubbock. Forster of course knew well enough that reading stories requires of us fairly complex operations which familiarity has enabled us to regard as simple. Let me offer an example of a feat of reading we all do very easily, but which could be made to seem arcane if one ...”

“... to his prep school headmaster, but not scholarly or perceptibly clever. He preferred talking to reading – an Astor trait – and kept a beagle pack and a polo pony. In his last year at Eton winning the hurdles was his only distinction, and he dropped out of Balliol after two years of PPE. Overwhelmed by the combination of recrimination and possessiveness ...”

“... Facebook’s mission used to be ‘making the world more open and connected’. A non-Facebooker reading that is likely to ask: why? Connection is presented as an end in itself, an inherently and automatically good thing. Is it, though? Flaubert was sceptical about trains because he thought (in Julian Barnes’s paraphrase) that ‘the railway would merely ...”

“... humble/devoted/faithful servant’ – these terms are fossils of what the historian Peter Laslett called ‘the world we have lost’, a world in which virtually all social relations, no matter how intimate, were defined by the language and ideology of service.To sense how this was so, we have only to look at the literature of the early modern ...”

“... A slight dust storm moves us indoors, where we sit around a big table, pecking at our laptops, reading news agency reports and emails. No place on earth is now too remote for men to be reached by emails from the merchants of penis enlargement. Much time is wasted as a result of this technology. It is supposed to enable you to gather more information, and ...”