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“... canteen, between telling stories about armalites or girls, exit wounds or telly programmes, we’d all go on about how much we’d love to fucking kill McGuinness. To blow him up. To gun him down. To do to him what his crowd had done, and was doing, to other people, to people we ...”

“... the last bastion of the Ancien Régime in the Third Republic: ‘Had tea with the old Duchesse de Rohan … Tea with the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre in her Passy house … She is witty and wicked … a femme littéraire about whom there is sometimes unsavoury talk. But about whom is there not?’ He experienced one air ...”

“... which best suits our ‘ordinary, human qualities’. But in the end William Gass doesn’t do any better. Having pointed out the polemical nature of this opposition, he concludes that the conflict between Modernism and the popular conception of ‘home’ is just another round in the on-going contest between middle-class Philistinism and the true art ...”

“... hundreds of thousands were built, had a bourgeois look. Coventry Cathedral and the Royal Festival Hall were modern architecture on a human scale. Though a high proportion of Londoners were being rehoused in flats, the LCC forbade the construction of blocks more than six storeys high. So there wasn’t a visible ‘social revolution’, or an invisible ...”

“... and one night, having had to ring the bell and remonstrate yet again, Joe burst out: ‘I’d like to give them a right kick up the arse.’ This wasn’t like Joe at all and turned into a family joke, and a useful one too, as Dad never swore, so to give somebody a kick up the arse became known euphemistically as ‘Joe Fitton’s Remedy’. With Dad it ...”

“... illegal in France. At university, she met Philippe Ernaux, got married, and had two boys, Eric and David. She returned to teaching, working for 23 years at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance, a sort of French Open University. The family moved to Cergy-Pontoise, a new town on the end of the RER A, on the ...”

“... One is whether there is any point reducing our own carbon footprint – as she and her followers do – unless, like them, we call loudly and often for comprehensive change. Another, closely linked, is whether taking people to task for their lifestyle choices – how often they fly, for instance, or eat meat – does more harm than good at a time when highly ...”

“... and bad ideas, valid and invalid arguments, sound and hare-brained methods. This is what academics do when we curate syllabuses, make appointments, allocate graduate places and funding, peer-review papers and books, and invite speakers. In each of these cases we are exercising our professional judgment about the intellectual worth and seriousness of other ...”

“... and the evidence mounts, the volumes become fatter. Those who have laboured in the past through D.A. Winstanley on Cambridge, C.E. Mallett on Oxford and Hastings Rashdall on the Medieval university will find the going even heavier: a reflection of the state of historical research today and the problems of assimilating or reducing unprecedented quantities of ...”

“... the belief in America as the city on a hill to which all yearn to travel, the superpower whose fin-de-siècle worries that its imperial powers were atrophying as those of other empires had done (see Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) were allayed by victory in the Cold War and the subsequent discovery that its economy is the driving force ...”

“... like Major himself, accepted almost without question the Unionist formulation: Sinn Fein/IRA. They do so in spite of the fact that few details of the relationship are known and many of the ‘insights’ plain wrong. The Sunday Times, for example, was demonstrably mistaken when it announced that Gerry Kelly, one of Sinn Fein’s chief negotiators at ...”

“... and the aggressive mother was making it impossible for anyone to get inside; in conclusion, she’d like to stick a few Katyushas up the mayor’s arse (my impression is that the poor man is doing the best he can). I am squeezed through the crowd to talk to the municipality spokesman, Doron Shanfer. He treats me to a hard-line racist speech, denouncing ...”

“... to a friend shortly afterwards, ‘though the Evening Standard man told me frankly that they’d all written their pieces about Naipaul and felt they were free to get drunk.’ Unlike the others on the shortlist, Offshore was, in the words of Asa Briggs, who chaired the judges, a roman pur: short, deep, highly crafted, about a colony of misfits in London ...”

“... at least in Protestant accounts. Greater notice is taken of the plaudits of the chronicler Edward Hall and of the (qualified) gratitude of the martyrologist John Foxe. Yet there has been an alternative tradition in Henrician historiography, and not only on the Catholic side. Beside Shakespeare’s tribute to Henry stands Sir Walter Ralegh’s protest: ‘if ...”

“... Giving offence has become an unfashionable sport, but Kingsley Amis belongs in its hall of fame, one of the all-time greats. When Roger Micheldene, the central character in his 1963 novel, One Fat Englishman, is warned that he’s about to say something he’ll be sorry for, he replies, ‘those are the only things I really enjoy saying’ – and there isn’t much sign that Micheldene or his creator did feel sorry afterwards ...”