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“... uniformly laudatory. This was not easy in the face of critics as formidable as Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Basil Liddell Hart, and by the beginning of World War Two the attempts to defend him were looking increasingly threadbare. The publication of Haig’s Diaries after the war (unkindly described by Lord Beaverbrook as committing suicide after ...”

“... ancient ‘quantity theory of money’ which, two centuries after it was so elegantly spelt out by David Hume and a century after it was translated into snappy but empty symbols – MV = PT – by Irving Fisher, is still the basis of so much analysis of inflation. As Sir Ian says, ‘old doctrines never die: in economics, they never even fade away.’ He ...”

“... urban counter-terrorist force does not make edifying reading. In 1941, a subaltern in the Guards, David Stirling, fighting Rommel in the Western Desert, decided that what the campaign needed was guerrilla tactics: small units of highly-trained commandos striking by stealth. After the war, the skills of the first Special Air Service were transferred to the ...”

“... and is now shrinking to its original membership (who are breathing sighs of relief). It came in on David Bowie and glam-rock, unisex, disco and women’s lib, short hair and Andy Warhol. Kids arriving in New York from the outback needed a quick code to bridge the gap from hick to sophisticate. Greyhound got them to the bus station and Gay took them on from ...”

“... with wartime controls was an aberration. (Wartime America was much less obedient.) Cartoon by David Langdon for ‘Punch’, November 1949. Mark Roodhouse’s answer to the crude question of just how much black market activity there was in Britain, both during the war and in the period of postwar austerity, is that, though widespread, it was far less so ...”

“... if you gave up and went home to bed. So it has always bothered me to be told that E=mc2 contains a vital truth about the world and not to be able to grasp what that truth is. There are, I know, those who think that science is a special kind of truth that I’ve no business trying to grasp if I don’t have the mathematical tools to understand it, because not ...”

“... Office (one of the antecedents of the Office for National Statistics), the census quickly became vital to the expanding machinery of the modern nation-state. In certain respects, it exemplified the new forms of bureaucracy that sprang up in the 19th century to govern what the historian James Vernon described as a ‘society of strangers’ in his study ...”

“... defence solicitor to ask a police officer to be a defence witness, but Graham’s evidence proved vital. At trial, Virdi was represented by Henry Blaxland QC, who in his closing speech to the jury laid out the absurdity of the case. We barely had time to sit down in the canteen before the jury came back with its verdict. Virdi was acquitted of both ...”

“... much controversy about ‘musical wallpaper’, though the exchanges quoted here between David Drew (deploring it), Hans Keller (finding paradoxical good in it) and Shawe-Taylor (thinking of benefits to the elderly) centre on the transmission of Haydn’s complete symphonies. Worse was to come, including Mainly for Pleasure. In the years leading up ...”

“... yes!’ came the enthusiastic chorus. You might say that the Jerusalem Syndrome began with King David. Once he had escorted Israel’s sacred Ark of the Covenant into the city, having conquered its Jebusite inhabitants and proclaimed it his capital, he danced in his exaltation ‘before the Lord with all his might … girded with a linen ephod’ – the ...”

“... in such a state that, when war recurred, City financiers would once again be able to perform their vital bankrolling function. Later, in the middle decades of the century, these same economic policies were defended on the Cobdenite ground that they would bring about peace and goodwill between nations. Yet Britain’s competitive advantage as the ‘workshop of ...”

“... he was never much of a Marxist in the first place. In (post-)colonial conditions, culture is a vital medium of power, and culture, not least in the Stalinist Fifties when Hall set out, had never exactly been Marxism’s strongest point. If culture is integral to colonial power, however, it is equally central to advanced capitalism, so that Hall was able to ...”

“... years after the event. And perhaps she was right, though that cannot be the reason for their son, David Profumo, once more resurrecting it. Presumably he needed to get it out of his system. Whatever his reasons, he tries to discover in this well-crafted memoir, which is effectively a joint biography of his parents and himself – a difficult undertaking ...”

“... than ‘thinking in terms’. Certainly the occupation of Brittany was thought of by Monty as a vital logistic step, a consummation of the campaign’s first phases (it was, in the event, largely irrelevant – the battle of France moved too fast). But there were, always and naturally, concepts for advance to and across the Seine, as the phase map D’Este ...”

“... conspiracy, imprisonment, exile, violent death. Emily’s lengthy collaboration with Anne remained vital to her imaginative life before, during and after composition of the novel that would make her famous.The stories Emily and Anne wrote about Gondal have not survived. But their poems have. It’s to these we need to look to understand how Emily was able to ...”