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“... special operators from the War on Terror years have specialised in a different genre: the business self-help manual. These former military officers feel that a career spent planning deadly missions and leading men into messy wars makes them uniquely qualified to offer ‘Battle-Tested Strategies for Creating Successful Organisations and Inspiring Extraordinary ...”

“... the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic assessments of the programme were back in fashion. According to Birt, the BBC’s Chairman, Marmaduke ...”

“... turn on the encounter between the energetic yet dreamy narrator, moving ‘in a boyish euphoria of self-sufficiency’, as he puts it in Behind the Wall: A Journey through China, and the sometimes deflating realities he finds. Once these have made him feel grizzled and disabused he’ll have a moment of human contact or a brush with the beautiful, but either ...”

“... for his ideals, but he is more of a Thomas Mann-style grand bourgeois. Perhaps the multiple self-portraits make sense: there’s always more than one Hans Fallada. In Fallada’s 1942 memoir, Damals bei uns daheim (Our Home in Days Gone By), he describes himself as a Pechvogel, an unlucky devil, who fell down a flight of stairs when he was three and ...”

“... failure when his strength left him, his passion faded.’ The poems written at Ooty had been self-denying. ‘Wood Song’ describes ‘agonies/ That love can never consummate’, but that last day’s events had changed Lewis’s mind: as soon as he left, on the long train journey to Karachi, he was writing letters to Aykroyd to make it clear that their ...”

“... of Part (or Act) V. Its plot is related by two characters called Portia and Cylinda, who tell a self-consciously Shakespearean story of the fortunes and romances of an improvident father and his three children. Running alongside and over the top of this is a series of exchanges and arguments between the speaking characters: Portia, Cylinda, an allegorical ...”

“... between Presbyterians and Independents, the former desiring a national church and the latter self-governing congregations; then an explosion of exotically named sects – Ranters, Seekers, Muggletonians, Grindletonians; and in America the showdown between the ruling Calvinists and ‘Antinomian’ dissidents. Cries of blasphemy and heresy arose on all ...”

“... house in Cheshire and his mind would all his life pullulate – like that of his mother’s cousin Robert Louis Stevenson – in a ‘nursery-sickroom atmosphere’. His father, a captain in the York and Lancasters, was killed at Ypres in May 1915. His maternal grandmother, Emily, was ‘a great psychosomatic virtuoso’. And his mother Kathleen’s ‘intense ...”

“... For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries ...”

“... end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about Irving, but attacking Gray causes wrathful indignation among Holocaust dogmatists. I sought to learn from men who became monsters, such as Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Treblinka (about whom I wrote in ...”

“... got at, as I did when I had to do a poetry reading for Amis in 1976, though then it was his self-consciously chappish manner I found hardest to cope with, never knowing if it was piss-taking quite. It’s stated in the book that Denis Brogan, fellow of Peterhouse, broadcaster and expert on the USA, used to boast that he had fucked in 46 of the 50 ...”

“... to failure and the posthumous honour of indie renown. The largest exception to the rule, as Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams show in Kubrick: An Odyssey, owed his escape to a coalescence of luck and preternatural self-confidence.Kubrick is a comprehensive Life. It yields, in orderly procession, almost every fact a ...”

“... some people as a great journalist. But if he is, that is a tribute to the power of longevity and self-created myth. To be read for the studied perversity of one’s opinions, and the calculated outrage provoked by one’s means of expressing them, supplies celebrity of a sort. As a contribution to public knowledge and even public entertainment, though, it ...”

“... vivid book, New York Cops Talk Back: A Study of a Beleaguered Minority.1 They used to derive their self-esteem from the belief that they were the guardians of society, the embodiment of its values: they represented right. The police force, moreover, used to be a means by which poor people could climb the social ladder. But now they feel they are no longer ...”

“... comes to terms with one’s past.’ How very American, I thought: the quest for roots; self-measurement against the promise of the past; the reunion as a personal and collective stock-taking. A painful business. Meanwhile, however, Tony was persuading me. As a student of American culture, who had had a particular college experience in the United ...”