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“... Philip Kerr’s detective hero Bernie Gunther is Sam Spade with raw herring on his breath and a smattering of German or Germanic slang (‘Kripo’ for the Criminal Police, ‘bulls’ for policemen, ‘chocoladies’ for those of dubious virtue) stirred into his tough private-eye talk. He drags on a cigarette, keeps a bottle in his desk, has a way with women but not much luck with them ...”

“... eyewitness, but a good author is always an eyewitness. My random instances show what a bright idea Philip Kerr has had in investigating modes of lying, by deploying quotation, anecdote, gossip and history, over which ‘literary effect’ is always tentatively hovering. On the question of who discovered America Emerson wrote that Amerigo Vespucci ...”

“... best-known novels based on the premise of a German or Axis victory are Len Deighton’s SS GB and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. I can remember two no less interesting television variations on the theme: Giles Cooper’s epic play The Other Man, and a serial by Philip Mackie, An Englishman’s ...”

“... into the Round Table, a proto-think tank named after a quarterly started by Milner and edited by Philip Kerr. Much later the group metamorphosed into the Cliveden Set. Fox calls his chapter about the Kindergarten alumni ‘Brain Fag’ (Kerr’s coinage), ‘a form of anti-climactic stress ... contracted from years of ...”

“... Isabel) Jakowicz believes, the Lipstick Man? Such facetiousness is characteristic of Philip Kerr’s uncertain tone. In the moment after this jokiness, Jake flushes with anger at the callousness of her fellow detectives, who fail to recognise that the victim ‘had once been a beautiful young woman with her whole future in front of ...”

“... In twenty years,’ Lady Astor used to say of Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, ‘I’ve never known Philip to be wrong on foreign politics.’ Though Lothian himself thought much the same, it is, in fact, harder to think of an occasion when he was right. As Sir Robert Vansittart, the strongly anti-Nazi head of the Foreign Office in the 1930s put it, ‘Lothian was an incurably superficial Johnny-Know-All ...”

“... us, he was operating in what was probably his fifth language. He soon came to the notice of Philip Kerr, Lloyd George’s private secretary, and subsequently to that of the prime minister himself. Pointed questions were asked in Parliament about his anti-Polish sentiments, and a poisonous piece in G.K. Chesterton’s weekly magazine New Witness ...”

“... depend on the support of aristocratic admirers like Blanche Dugdale (A.J. Balfour’s niece) and Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian; and he was delighted to play Burke to Harold Macmillan’s Lord Rockingham. Namier affected to despise all ideological ‘isms’ and A.J.P. Taylor spoke of his having taken the mind out of history. Professor Colley not only puts ...”

“... invited Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times, Nevile Henderson, ambassador to Germany, and Philip Kerr, the Marquess of Lothian, a Christian Scientist like Nancy, and one of several to express the view that in marching into the Rhineland, Germany was merely walking into its own backyard. Nancy and Waldorf also regularly entertained Neville ...”

“... of the 20th century.One of the most popular women’s teams was formed in 1917 at the Dick, Kerr and Co. munitions factory in Preston. Women workers joined male apprentices playing in the factory yard during their breaks; one day, the women beat the men, and decided to establish Dick, Kerr Ladies. The plan was to play ...”

“... terms. We now believe that the author of the supple and muscular prose instanced above was Alice Kerr-Sutherland, a no-nonsense governess who in the early years of the century had abandoned her errant but legitimate little charges to pursue the high road of madamhood. Her flagellation brothel in St James’s was a place of resort for the gentry and nobility ...”

“... In the summer of 1618, Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, Count of Gondomar, Ambassador of Philip III to the Court of James I had a clever idea. For four years the proposal that James’s son Prince Charles should marry the Infanta Maria had been batted to and fro between London and Madrid in an attempt to bring about an Anglo-Spanish alliance ...”

“... about the death of another man, Colin Roach, in a police station; £48,699 to Stephen Dowsett and Philip Tape who were walking home from a dance a little drunk when they were bundled into a police van, taken to a police station and so terribly beaten that Dowsett’s jaw had to be re-set in two places; £17,500 to Manit Schemir, a mechanical engineer who was ...”

“... the weakness of the domestic claimants; the threat posed by James’s main foreign rival, Philip II’s daughter the Infanta Clara Eugenia; and, last but not least, the new shared British identity that Protestantism had created. Yet for all the smoothness of the union of the Crowns, it was little more than a decade after James’s death that the ...”

“... also to have a powerful influence on social perceptions of homosexuality. His arch-enemy Alfred Kerr was not far wrong with his sneer that Mann had ‘made pederasty palatable to the middle classes’. The novella’s effect was all the stronger for not being – Philip Kitcher misreads it – about ‘a closet ...”