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“... way in which the commotions began tends to support the view of, among others, Abraham Lincoln and Harold Macmillan that events are the motors of history, not policy decisions, or, according to Hoyle, the deeper underlying structures, the slowly shifting tectonic plates preferred by Braudel and his school. The unfortunately coincidental presence in north-east ...”

“... as such as ‘could only have been contrived by a poet who had never experienced pregnancy’. To Harold Acton she was ‘the essential hysterical intellectual spinster’ and however unpleasant his tone it is impossible to disagree with his conclusion that ‘dear Edith wasn’t exactly what you might call cuddly.’ As so often it is Sitwell herself who ...”

“... press has any trouble speaking in both tongues, often at the same time. The child killers of James Bulger are ‘evil’, as of course are paedophiles; maybe abuse of the Bulger killers would have counted as a deed of righteous vengeance. In the recent flap over Jon Venables’s reincarceration, op-ed narodniks happily affirmed that he should be held ...”

“... Macaulay and Gibbon, Tom Paine and Cobbett, Hume and Herbert Spencer. They never missed a Harold Laski public lecture. They went in a solid phalanx to hear Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton debate at Kingsway Hall. And they formed an archaeological group to look for relics of Norman and Roman London whenever they happened to have freshly excavated building ...”

“... his advocacy of mostly British architecture, from the Brutalist buildings of the Smithsons and James Stirling, through the Pop designs of Archigram and Cedric Price, to the high-tech megastructures of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, so providing a critical genealogy for these postwar architects as well. Despite his smooth narrative, Whiteley does not paper ...”

“... of George III when trying to fit in another character who was larger than life, namely Charles James Fox. To have given him his proper due would have meant him taking over the play. And so it is with Humphrey Carpenter, my only excuse being that he would have been the first to understand this and to be unsentimental about it. When he turned up on the stage ...”

“... have to satisfy the demands of the all-powerful and long-serving head of CIA counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, who has recently died. The undeniably brilliant Angleton was also at least half-crazy. He saw moles everywhere and had paralysed the CIA for years on end with his frenetic witch-hunting. (One CIA officer wrote a bitter report suggesting that ...”

“... that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre in Milan’. The Nicolsons were hardly impoverished – they’d ...”

“... on A.E. Housman as a classical scholar or his influential meditation on ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’. In 1940 he published To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, his account of the revolutionary tradition from Michelet through Marx and up to the Bolsheviks. This may look like the one among his works that was wholly ...”

“... to be sure, was self-inflicted: while a few of his fellow Etonians (Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton) were bursting precociously into print, Orwell chose to slave away in Parisian kitchens even when he was coughing up blood, sleep in dosshouses while cadging the odd ten shillings off his bemused parents, put in a spot of portering at ...”

“... characters got a tick if they were on the side of liberty (Cromwell, Chatham), a cross (Charles I, James II) if they held up the march of progress. Because he went in for active royalty and made some attempt to govern on his own account rather than leaving it to the Whig aristocracy, George III had been written up as a villain and a clumsy tyrant. This view ...”

“... specialised, high-demand skills – whether tech entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers, LeBron James or Jerry Seinfeld – could leverage their assets, market globally, and amass more wealth than any group in human history. But for ordinary workers, capital mobility and automation meant an ever-weakening bargaining position. Manufacturing towns lost their ...”

“... of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of Guildford, Foreign Office minister, still in government at the age of 76 under his fellow Etonian David ...”

“... read Rorty, we know that Freud’s a ‘strong poet’ and that, swerve and dribble as we may with Harold Bloom, we can’t escape his influence. Anyway, the goal posts are contingent, and an irritable reaching after fact and reason, like Gellner’s, is doomed from the start. Thus Leo Bersani shuns ‘verification’ and finds in late Freud a discourse which ...”

“... the Tate catalogue essay which is Chapter Five here) has made a large contribution. But as Harold Rosenberg remarked tartly of Giacometti, ‘an artist who interprets his own creations rarely lacks collaborators,’ and Giacometti has had several. There is Genet’s account of the artist and his work, and of having his portrait painted. There is ...”