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“... On​ a wet and windy Saturday in October a few regulars of the Ian Allan Book and Model Shop gathered inside the premises for the last time. The shop – on Lower Marsh, behind Waterloo Station – would soon be a memory, like many things to do with the railway hobby. One or two customers chatted to the soon to be redundant staff ...”

“... Readers of the old Eagle may remember that educative comic’s colourful centre-spread, where every week the latest triumphs of British technology (this was the new Elizabethan age) would be dissected for the enlightenment of British boyhood (girls read the Girl). The cutaway drawing, the arrow and the numbered part explained the workings of the jet engine or the diesel locomotive, or how Hunt’s expedition scaled Everest with oxygen masks and Kendal mint cake ...”

“... The golden generation’ is the way Selina Todd describes us in Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth (Chatto, £25). We are the children born between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s (1945 in my case) who, in Todd’s words, ‘were more likely to be upwardly mobile than any generation before or since’. More than 50 per cent of us, if we were male, and 40 per cent, if we were female, reached a higher social class than our parents, against less than 20 per cent who went in the other direction ...”

“... Southern Britons may be forgiven for thinking that most people in Scotland grew up in cottages among the purple bens, or in tenements dwarfed by shipyard cranes, or in douce villas where grace was said over every scone. This is the legacy of Scottish literature and Scottish comedy, which in the course of this century has replaced one romantic stereotype with another – J ...”

“... Dervla Murphy made her name as a writer who got on her bike and travelled bravely and alone through the less accessible parts of the non-European world. More recently, she stayed closer to her Irish home and investigated the religious and social divisions of Northern Ireland. In this book she turns her attention to the non-European populations of two British cities, Bradford and Birmingham, and there confronts the hazards and complexities of inner-city life with the same fortitude – sometimes amounting to pig-headedness – which carried her through Baltistan, Ethiopia and the further reaches of Nepal ...”

“... on: animal slaughter was the social cement of Pincher’s Britain. Harry Hyams, Charles Clore, Jack Profumo, Lord Dilhorne, George Weidenfeld, Maurice Oldfield, Victor Rothschild, Lord Porchester, Andrew Parker Bowles: ideally they should be highlighted in bold type, as was the way in the Hickey column. The author lets us know a little about ...”

“... sat. Later, three legs became two when Harold Wilson and the trade unions’ grandest grandee, Jack Jones, reached the agreement known as the Social Contract, whereby workers agreed to moderate their wage demands so that the two-figure inflation rates could be beaten. Opinion polls decided Jones was the most powerful man in Britain. ‘Vote ...”

“... first black friends after they heard him attack the Wilson government’s nervous dealings with Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. Openly gay men and women were less easily happened on – Livingstone reckons he had met no more than four or five by his late twenties – but he was untroubled when the Gay Liberation Front encouraged many more to declare themselves and ...”

“... In the opening pages of Thomas Mann’s novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, the hero debates a question which has always worried him: which is better for the careerist, to see the world small or to see it big? The small view has its attractions. Great statesmen and empire-builders must see the world this way, Krull thinks: like a chessboard, with human pieces that can be manoeuvred coldly and boldly as the player rises above the mass of mankind ...”

“... How do we feel​ about Brexit now that a year has passed? As the old advert for tonic wine used to ask, above a drawing of a housewife with her head in her hands: Tired? Depressed? Anxious? No other public event in my lifetime has had such an invasive and lowering personal effect – in memory, the Cuban Missile Crisis came and went almost before you could say ‘Armageddon ...”

“... I grew up​ on a very useful piece of land, the hilly little peninsula that juts south into the Firth of Forth and provides travellers up and down the east coast of Scotland with the shortest and most convenient route across the estuary. For centuries, ferries made the crossing, but then the bridges came, first the Victorian railway bridge and then two road bridges (the second opened in 2017), their approaches gashing the peninsula with cuttings and infilling its hollows with embankments, adding to the alterations already made to the landscape by abandoned quarries that had left behind manmade cliffs of whinstone and ponds of dark, still water ...”

“... decks. Other than that, and a jacket of blue (hence ‘bluejackets’, hence every sailor as ‘Jack’), their dress varied according to their taste and pocket: they paid for their own clothes. The Imperial trade routes of the British merchant fleet – then, and for a long time after, the world’s largest collection of ships under a single flag – could ...”

“... In​ 2016, Oxford Dictionaries made ‘post-truth’ their word of the year, defining it as an adjective that described circumstances ‘in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. This hardly seems up to the job: if that’s all the word means, the wonder is that we have waited so long for it ...”

“... In​ 1987 the Proclaimers released a single called ‘Letter from America’, which compared the then ongoing industrial destruction of the Scottish Lowlands with the Highland Clearances two centuries before. It was a rare intrusion by an 18th-century lyric into the UK top ten. ‘Lochaber no more/Sutherland no more/Lewis no more/Skye no more’, sang the Proclaimers, reprising the sentiment a few lines later as ‘Bathgate no more/Linwood no more/Methil no more/Irvine no more ...”

“... men’ who ran Britain didn’t understand that ‘our cause is so much more than the Union Jack and the White Cliffs of Dover, which is all that Winston really represents.’ Hitler had to be fought with ideas. He was far from alone in this thinking, which grew in popularity and influence as the conflict progressed, culminating in Churchill’s defeat ...”