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“... have become, too much aware of what might theoretically be made of contemporary social situations. William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey should have been a very good novel but failed to be, because the author gave up his own involuntary and unconscious literary personality in favour of a plot that must have looked absolutely right – too right – for ...”

“... the centre. In the latter case, the revenge of the centre is sweet: send in the debunkers; Hugh Trevor-Roper, who has a selective nose for fakes, got the kilt job in The Invention of Tradition (1983). He made much of the difference between the authentic ‘plaid’, starting from the shoulders, and the modern ‘kilt’, starting from the waist. This ...”

“... that Elton’s English festschrift should be called History and Hard Work as a riposte to Trevor-Roper’s History and Imagination. But of course, as recent events have shown, the joke is not wholly against documentary historians. Meanwhile the apparent certainty of Elton’s conclusions, and the serene simplicity of his methodology (so much less ...”

“... advertisement hoardings and the Great Exhibition. Its gaudy vulgarity appalled such aesthetes as William Morris and, retrospectively, Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote of Victorian manufacture’s ‘rank growth’. Dickens was true neither to life nor to his age. He was a cartoonist rather than a documentarist – not that the veracity of documentarists is to be ...”

“... sentiment (wild geese and all), or the counterweight Protestant myth in Northern Ireland in which William III for ever rides a white horse. The interest of the Scottish sample of such beliefs lies in the fact that Scottish myths are not an expression of either successful or of frustrated nationalism. They mostly involve Scots holding with immense pride, but ...”

“... hastily published without an index, From the House of War, a book to be classed perhaps with William Howard Russell’s My Diary North and South on the opening phases of the American Civil War, is not at all carelessly written, nor is its quality impaired by periodic observations that remind one that the author is a television man. Indeed, that seems ...”

“... however, a number of ferociously anti-Marxist works began to appear. Their apotheosis was Hugh Trevor-Roper’s stunning revelation that Marx had made no original contribution to the history of ideas. Most of these critics, I take it, would have rejected the Marxist view that human thought is sometimes bent out of shape by the pressure of political ...”

“... gave orders to destroy a statue of Mangin in the seventh arrondissement.A performance piece by William Kentridge, The Head and the Load, which premiered at Tate Modern in July, is now showing at the Armory in New York (until 15 December). It tells the story of African porters serving the Great Powers as they fought it out in their respective African ...”

“... the medical reformer and Julian Huxley the socially-conscious scientist helped to set up Unesco. William Beveridge, a Liberal, saw his Welfare State largely enacted; Creech Jones, chairman of the Fabian Colonial Bureau which had been founded in 1940, became the minister responsible for the colonies; and the ‘garden city ideal’ of the Town and Country ...”

“... would have wanted Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in the leads. But Ford insisted on Claire Trevor and John Wayne (who wasn’t a star until this movie made him one). Dietrich and Cooper would have turned Dallas and Ringo into the natural aristocrats that Ford didn’t want; Trevor and the young Wayne assume no ...”

“... two publications have made it possible, as never before, to attempt to understand the enigmatic William Godwin, the author of one of the great novels of the 18th century and of the founding text in the philosophy of anarchism, the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, the father of Mary Shelley, and the friend or acquaintance of almost everyone on the liberal ...”

“... he encountered keen criticism from academic historians, spearheaded by Pieter Geyl and Hugh Trevor-Roper, which marginalised his major project in the eyes of his own profession. As his new biographer, William McNeill, candidly declares, ‘a principal purpose of this book is to try to establish a better balance ...”

“... outfit, with a list of staff and advisers that includes the Conservative peers Paul Deighton and William Hague, director and chairman respectively. The former Labour minister Shriti Vadera sits on the advisory board. ‘Hakluyt sells its political connections,’ a contact who has worked in London’s corporate intelligence world for decades told ...”

“... to music texts recalled from memory. Friends were soon killed, or reported killed. When the poet William Harvey, with whom he had had an intense friendship, was taken prisoner but presumed dead, Gurney wrote ‘To His Love’: ‘with thick-set/Masses of memoried flowers –/Hide that red wet/Thing I must somehow forget.’ A corporal with whom he had fallen ...”

“... conscience to join the Independent Labour Party while at Oxford and together with his friend William Beveridge founded a society to study social questions (though it appears to have met only once). But Tawney, who held a classical scholarship, received glowing reports in his first year and clearly loved his time at Oxford, appears to have assumed he ...”