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“... independence in Africa was more or less complete by the mid-1960s. Decolonisation had lifted the white man’s burden and allowed African activists to strike out on their own – with a ceremonial nod to their European benefactors. But if this characterisation was absurd, so was the notion that colonial rule in Africa was an anomaly by the 1970s: millions of ...”

“... but also draws attention to the fact that they fail to interest his interlocutor, a ‘spectacled white man sitting with a broad census-taker’s portfolio’. The census-taker quickly runs through his list of questions and then departs the story as, in a rather different way, does the man whose name, age, occupation and family background he records: Samuel ...”

“... older and more dependent labourers say they would not want it any other way. In black Africa and white Africa beer is used to buy submission or allegiance. It was not for nothing that the young Soweto rioters of 1976 attacked the government beer-halls: they felt their elders were being sapped of money and political anger. Anthropologists and sociologists ...”

“... Modernist writer, it is better to move from Bold’s workmanlike expositions of the poetry to Kenneth Buthlay’s splendid new edition of A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle. Fully glossed, annotated, and with a forceful introduction, this edition will be of great value to both old and new readers of the poem. It supplies much linguistic, literary and ...”

“... the sides of the vans. Many in the crowd – sick with condemnation – howled and spat and wept. Kenneth Clarke has promised measures to deal with ‘nasty, persistent juvenile little offenders’. Those two little offenders – if they were the offenders, the childish child-murderers from Walton – were caught on camera twice. First, on the security camera ...”

“... there is no attempt at fairness, which is fatal to humour. Like his friend and contemporary Kenneth Clark, Lancaster felt the Edwardians’ horrified fascination with the Victorians in general and the Gothic Revival in particular, that ‘crazy antiquarianism’ which began with Ruskin, ‘whose distinction it was to express in prose of incomparable ...”

“... against danger. It was this trouble making sense of sleep in Darwinian terms which, in Kenneth Miller’s account, marginalised the topic of sleep in medical science until the 20th century. There was rather more investigation of these questions earlier than he implies, especially in Germany, but it’s a striking fact that a hundred years ago there ...”

“... is no great exporter (France is without Marmite) and the ecologist is his brother, Teddy. Sam White, the Paris columnist of the Evening Standard, and a long-standing friend of Goldsmith, suggested to Richard Ingrams, as the heat died down, that the ‘services’ mistake was really a Wilson/Falkender joke. The ‘ecology’, according to ...”

“... distinctly clubby, with little interest in anyone outside their world of clipboards, airlifts and white SUVs. They gave off a kind of Ready-brek glow, the aura of the consciously high-minded. I remember talking to a young Spaniard heading home after a spell in Sudan. A couple of sheets to the wind, he joked about the reception he expected. ‘You know, in ...”

“... In​ the opening scene of his television series Civilisation (1969), Kenneth Clark admits that while he can’t define exactly what civilisation is, he knows it when he sees it. The camera pans towards Notre Dame Cathedral as if to say ‘this is it.’ For Clark, the artistic achievement of the medieval period was European ...”

“... look compounded of stage flats and wizened textures picked out in brass-rubbing black, ceiling white, royal blue and pillarbox red. Here was a love of the notionally unspoilt, a harking back to George V Georgian and, ideally, to the Georgian of Georges IV, III and II, not to mention the Edwardian of Edward the Confessor. Steeped in the notion of things ...”

“... killed. Here too she met the man who became her second husband and gave Tomáš a new name: Major Kenneth Stoppard, a reliable provider, a xenophobe and antisemite, who towards the end of his life suggested his stepson stop using his surname. ‘Sorry Dad,’ was the reply. ‘It’s not practical.’ The new family left for England in 1946. Large numbers of ...”

“... seat when Wilson increased Labour’s majority from four to 95 in 1966. Crossman’s predecessor, Kenneth Robinson, had appointed Howe to chair an inquiry into scandalous allegations, made in the News of thr World, of cruelty, torture and theft at Ely Hospital, a psychiatric institution near Cardiff. Howe’s final report had been submitted in September ...”

“... Three factors appear to have been decisive. First, hostility to the Republican regime in the White House. Cultural dislike of the Bush Presidency is widespread in Western Europe, where its rough affirmations of American primacy, and undiplomatic tendency to match word to deed, have become intensely resented by public opinion accustomed to a more decorous ...”

“... necessary alienation from fixed address. My favourite Didion passage of all time, from The White Album, typifies what I will call ‘hotel prose’: TO PACK AND WEAR:   2 skirts   2 jerseys or leotards   1 pullover sweater   2 pair shoes   stockings   bra   nightgown, robe, slippers   cigarettes   bourbon   bag ...”