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“... schoolboys came into their own, hogging the Queen’s Commission and acquiring conscript valets. Trevor Royle, a serious young Scot, describes ‘the National Service Experience, 1945-63’ in his worthy book, The Best Years of Their Lives: he feels sorry that he was too young to meet this challenge himself. By the Sixties all we conscripts had emerged ...”

“... more than an opinionated sketch, chatty, anecdotal, unsubstantiated and frequently inaccurate. Trevor Royle’s is an altogether more serious book, a thorough, workmanlike biography which must surely have assembled the last possible jot of evidence on the sinking of the Hampshire. Both authors, however, feel it necessary to present their portraits as ...”

“... is God’s own gift to the sifter of anecdotes and the historian of large-scale cultural change. Trevor Royle tackles it with affection and enthusiasm. Admirable as these qualities are, the reader might expect something substantial in return for an exposure to Royle’s eagerness. What does he get? Well, he gets a lot ...”

“... to the definition of Englishness, or perhaps Britishness. In the ‘sceptical’ 1960s, Trevor Royle tells us, some people considered the British Raj a ‘shameful thing’, and ‘the idea of empire was met with derision by younger intellectuals’; now, in the Eighties, happily liberated from guilt, ‘people want to know ... why the ...”

“... form’ in favour of parallel feet, straight hips and regular steps. The nation was reduced to Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter. The decline of the gentlemanly ideal transformed the political nation during the second half of the 20th century. The ‘secret rules of upper classness’ ceased to apply, and poshness became less fashionable. This was just one ...”