“... if there was an underlying bitterness it was extremely well concealed. History, however, is made by historians and, in the short run at any rate, cannot be relied upon to provide totally objective judgments. Field-Marshal Montgomery, despite his low opinion of academics, was well aware that the muse can ...”

“... first cookery book in 1960, as part of my trousseau. It was called Plats du Jour, or Foreign Food by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd, a Penguin paperback with a seductive pink jacket depicting a large family at table – evidently not a British family, for its members, shirt-sleeved, aproned, some of them children, were uncorking bottles, slicing ...”

“... if (as is likely) they reject his own tight-lipped explanation or suspect him of a proud pose. By coincidence, Thesiger’s book appears along with Worlds Apart by Gavin Young, of ‘slow boat’ fame, who once aspired to follow him into the Empty Quarter of Arabia, but settled instead for a stint in the lands of Sumer ...”

“... to write the history of World War Two, its ramifications or antecedents. Nor is his story going to be a systematic study of American (or British, or for that matter, Soviet) occupation of what was the Third Reich. He is interested in the human story, in the wounded sensibilities of occupier and occupied, of victor and vanquished. He finds a country devastated ...”

“... that Cambodia will follow a system of liberal democracy on the basis of pluralism.’ To read David Chandler’s painstakingly researched history of Cambodia and its turbulent politics since 1945, and to visit present-day Cambodia, is to understand the enormity of the task facing the United Nations as it attempts to bring peace to the country and to ...”

“... of dealers, call girls, security men, parking attendants, everyone whose co-operation needs to be purchased; and above all into a suitcase taken onto a plane by a lonely, forlorn-looking man who delivers it to a group of ageing Italians on the East Coast of America. De Niro explains all this, with Scorsese’s ...”

“... of the writers around Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Actors were even encouraged in their cups by movie fans. According to the pioneer producer J. Stuart Blackton, ‘Prohibition ... brought about the unique situation of reminiscent and heartfelt applause from the audience whenever a man is seen to take a drink on screen.’ The quality of a Beverly Hills ...”

“... foot four, Wilson was an imposing figure. In 1886, on imperial service in Burma, he was attacked by local bandits, hostile to colonial rule, with a long, sharp knife used for cutting bamboo. The wound left a permanent scar over his right eye which caused his face to droop. His four-year term as chief of the imperial general staff, the most senior military ...”

“... country would buy the pavilion on completion. The first to do so was Belgium, in 1907, followed by Hungary, Britain and Bavaria (now the German pavilion) in 1909, and the French and Swedish pavilions in 1912 (the latter was given to the Netherlands when the Swedes failed to pay). After the First World War came Spain, Czechoslovakia, the US, Greece and ...”

“... are embarking on a very long epic: this poem will run to around 800 BCE, the point at which the by now long-marooned north-westerners began employing iron. But it concludes with a flourish, flaunting a metal detectorist’s 2018 coup, a two-inch crescent of chased gold dug out from Shropshire marshland: ‘2800 years ago, this pendant was cast into the sky ...”

“... Almost a hundred years ago, however, Hollesley Bay was one of the labour ‘colonies’ set up by the Poor Law guardians of Poplar in London’s East End, who sought to ease the Poor Law crisis in the capital by relocating unemployed men and their families to the coast. The inspiration behind the scheme was George ...”

“... footing about the end of the 17th century: as small a regular army as was indispensable, paid for by annual vote of the House of Commons, and an officer corps drawn so largely from the same class of gentlemen as filled Parliament as to be untroubled by its obligation to obey the civil ...”

“... If the prime minister hoped to deflect attention from the local election results by a well-timed reshuffle he has certainly succeeded. Much was thought to hang on the election results and they were as bad as Labour expected. Despite the panicky reshuffle, however, it isn’t clear how much we can read into them. Local elections in the last days of John Major’s government did, it’s true, accurately predict the outcome of the 1997 general election, but that is very unusual ...”

“... of food vouchers worth £35 a week. ‘Many asylum seekers come from communities where wealth may be stored in jewellery,’ explains the Home Office minister Mike O’Brien, ‘and it is right for us to take account of that wealth.’ ‘Is the minister suggesting,’ asks Diane Abbott MP, ‘that asylum seekers should sell their jewellery, perhaps their ...”

“... Somewhere in London, two heads would be nodding together: one tall like the boulder topping a cairn, the other broadened like a Hallowe’en pumpkin. Two lordly sensibilities, the heterosexual critic and the homosexual artist, had converged to discuss painting and the human condition. The thought that David Sylvester and Francis Bacon were caught up in this dialogue seemed at once daunting and salutary to some of us then learning to paint in the same town ...”