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“... appropriate than was perhaps intentional. Mr Kalugin looked as if he had been dreamed up in an Ian Fleming nightmare. His idea of light conversation, since I decided to ask him about some of the books under review, was to hint that he could say a lot if he chose. ‘Your Kim Philby ... ha, ha, ha, that’s quite another story ... Yuri Modin ...”

“... The Independent on Sunday of 22 December last weighed in with a mere forty crystal-gazers, from Ian Angell, ‘darling of the doom-and-gloom conference circuit’, down to Theodore Zeldin’s ‘persuasively touchy-feely manifesto’, An Intimate History of Humanity. Yet quite a few gloomsters were not checked in, notably éminence noire Conor Cruise ...”

“... his death, as well as some more thoughtful studies of the case and what it reveals about postwar Britain and its social structure. Thompson’s book is a mixture of all of these and the result is persuasive and revealing in some parts, absurd and tasteless in others. Yet it is a compelling read. The story doesn’t pall because it has become a myth and ...”

“... stick. But his performance had also been so compelling that everyone now wanted a piece of him. In Britain, they wanted a piece of him much more badly than they wanted any aspect of the complicated and ongoing story he’d worked to bring to light. Only the Guardian was publishing substantive material on GCHQ and the NSA. The government had circulated a ...”

“... for at least one of whose characters is in this book) and in sundry Sampsonian Anatomies of Britain, which is commemorated in this volume. Here is an official prosopography of official Britain: civil servants write about civil servants, scientists write about scientists, diplomats write about diplomats, and Speakers ...”

“... none of which was of any use to him. Instead he bumped uneasily through a rapidly changing postwar Britain, often the guinea pig for a modernising monarchy. The first heir to the throne to go to prep school, he arrived at Hill House in London in a chauffeur-driven limousine. Sent later to board at Gordonstoun he was beaten up, despite being the only pupil with ...”

“... one that he is stuck for ever in the era of the liberation struggle. During the many years of Ian Smith’s white minority regime, it seemed there was little that Mugabe’s party, Zanu, could do in the face of white power. Zanu’s armed wing, Zanla, was no match for the better trained and better equipped Rhodesians, and Mugabe dreamed in vain of driving ...”

“... allowed the new Irish laws on homosexuality to become, at a stroke, more liberal than those in Britain. Perhaps because so much of the Irish stereotype (and the tourist brand-image) conjures up an unchanging land where time stands still, the Irish faculty for changing practices or expectations with bewildering rapidity has been underestimated. Yet it is ...”

“... those who have lived before us, and those who are yet to be born.’ This election was perhaps Britain’s best chance of taming the turbo-capitalist Thatcherite beast. We were initially cheered by the result, but will the left come to regret the defeat of the statist vision Timothy was attempting to impose on a reluctant – but cowed and largely ...”

“... the distinction seems (at least to Knausgaard) impossible to deny. Hence the rage he directs at Ian Kershaw, the author of the classic English-language biography. Knausgaard accuses Kershaw of adopting a dismissive attitude towards the young Hitler, of failing to warm to the passion and innocence of his subject. This excessively ...”

“... of the 20th century, and for some time afterwards, who hadn’t received a classical education. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher, a scientist, was a rare exception; far more typical is Boris Johnson, who likes to quote great chunks of Ancient Greek from memory.In his original and engrossing book, the Oxford historian Paul Betts, an American who experienced ...”

“... comes ill from a man who sneered ruthlessly at his own country while giving aid and comfort to Ian Smith’s gang of traitors and mutineers. The vulgarity of the politics also compromises, I find, the impression of the gentleman. When Worsthorne writes of being taken up by Irving Kristol at Encounter in the mid-Fifties, his self-deprecation deserts him as ...”

“... different perspectives, these four novels explore the underlying unease of life as it is lived in Britain in the Eighties.’ ‘Underlying unease’ is putting it mildly: at a first reading, I found these novelists (born 1958, 1958, 1959, 1961) almost unrelievedly depressing, stuck in bleak unmediated attitudes of despair. Later, I came to make ...”

“... times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain.’ The truth is, of course, that The Wealth of Nations is not a very violent attack on the commercial system but a collection of 17th-century truisms, and anyway the country was usually at war: free trade is not often maintained in wartime. But the ...”

“... was demoralised and took only five further wickets in the series. It is not generally realised in Britain that this undoubtedly very great partnership was achieved against a crippled attack, and was certainly assisted when the batsmen found that the umpires would never give them lbw if they padded away straight balls by playing well forward. Sobers does not ...”