“... won independence from British rule in 1960, the country descended into a two-and-a-half-year civil war during which between 500,000 and three million people died, mostly from starvation. In the words of Ọbáfẹmi Awólọ́wọ́, then the federal minister of finance, ‘all is fair, and starvation is one of the weapons of ...”

“... one has rejected, if only by mocking them. Isherwood’s prejudices against his family and his class were clearly ways of keeping them in mind, and his brother and his mother – who dies as these diaries begin – are never far from his thoughts. Going to America in the 1930s became a way of thinking about growing up in England before the First World ...”

“... and Charles Pooter; not forgetting, from an earlier age, Flashman and Rochester’s mad wife. In a class of their own come the surrogate writers who are authorised to enrich the leftovers of a dead storyteller. The late, prolific Alistair MacLean (‘Ach, any idiot can write a book’) did not bequeath a hero who became a household name, but he left a clutch ...”

“... in them or a magnum of pink champagne. He was very happy. I lied and told him that all the upper class were beautiful and intelligent and he must not allow his vermin to destroy them.’ Mrs Fleming wrote a great many letters to Evelyn Waugh, telling him where she’d had lunch and where she’d had supper and who’d been there and made a fool of ...”

“... of America. What’s a girl without congenital wealth to do if she hasn’t been blessed with some class-effacing talent or exceptional looks, when she knows that success in life is the result of an individual’s effort? Grasp the opportunity; go for surgery – which, it would seem from the association of beauty with an opera audition, is likely to take care ...”

“... would have been nowhere without him. He wasn’t resented on personal grounds alone, however; class, or else race, came into it, too. Bradman was Protestant English, his family having emigrated from rural East Anglia to rural New South Wales halfway through the 19th century; he was born on a smallholding. Fingleton and O’ Reilly, along with others in ...”

“... The debate over Ireland’s decision to maintain neutrality during the Second World War periodically resurfaces in the letters page of the Irish Times, exposing the cracks in established political pieties. The challenge tends to come from those resistant to the idea that the political circumstances of the time made neutrality the most rational policy ...”

“... than eating too much asparagus or thinking mushy peas were guacamole – waging an illegal war, for example. Whoever the target is, however, the implications of the charge are the same: behind their shutters, in their comfortable homes, tucking into their magrets de canard, the dinner-party crowd don’t know what’s going on in the real world. The ...”

“... Arabic literature, the conservation of ancient buildings, internal politics and the conduct of the war against Iran’. At the time that seemed a bit naive to us – and so, you could say, it proved, though it’s hard to see what harm was done. He only learned that he was expected to lay a wreath on Britain’s behalf as he walked up the steps to the ...”

“... the creation of the Committee of Imperial Defence. But after Britain’s performance in the Boer War no prime minister could have left things as they were. Reform had been long overdue even before South Africa laid bare our military deficiencies. Balfour, characteristically, did nothing drastic. Ten years earlier a Ministry of Defence had been advocated ...”

“... modelled – Brendan Bracken. Even in the political fluidity of the Thirties and the Second World War, Bracken, with his self-created and well-advertised mystique as a man of mystery, taxed to the limit the Tories’ appetite for self-made adventurers, already fully tested in the past by such as Disraeli and ‘F.E.’ Bracken, on the face of it, seemed the ...”

“... twenty years ago, ‘extrapolating from trends’, judged that ‘the steady increase since the war in the numbers in sixth forms, and in those getting good results in their A-level examinations, would continue.’ But for Helen Gardner, who served at that time on the Robbins Committee on Higher Education, those confident extrapolators of trends figure ...”

“... oddly well-timed. The hero of this novel, Walter F. Starbuck, joins the Communist Party before the war while still at Harvard. Later he becomes a civil servant, and in 1949 is investigated by a Congressional committee on Communism. After the hearing he is simply demoted, but in his testimony he mentions the Communist affiliations of a former friend who is now ...”

“... by the slump. They were all excited by the political changes and administrative advances of the war. Four of them entered the Commons soon after. They were all convinced that with Keynes, Beveridge, most of Whitehall, Transport House and even Smith Square behind them, they could do something towards a more decent society. They did not, of course, all always ...”

“... intellectual mitosis, into three books,’ under the general title No Man’s Land. The first, War of the Words (1988), offered a theoretical overview of male and female writers from the 1890s to the present. It represented the battle between the sexes as a linguistic and literary struggle that generated Modernism itself. Twentieth-century woman ...”