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“... Romans ever did,’ writes Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘instead of trying to see how the Roman ruling class built the system of their own government to ensure order in the State and continuity to their own rule.’ Mommsen’s influence lasted long, particularly in England, where the ‘Whig’ approach to modern history had its counterpart in the study of ...”

“... records 368 million items under the word ‘family’, as against a mere 170 million under ‘war’. All governments have tried to encourage or discourage procreation and passed laws about human coupling and decoupling. All the global religions (with the possible exception of Buddhism) and all the 20th-century ideologies have strong convictions on these ...”

“... rural Georgia and through hard work and self-discipline managed to join Atlanta’s Black middle class. The elder King established strong connections with the city’s white power brokers – so strong, in fact, that even while speaking out against racism he urged parishioners, including the ten-year-old Martin, dressed as a slave, to take part in a gala ...”

“... enterprise, whose life often seems little more than an endless round of state dinners and high-class shopping. In the end, Perry does as well as any biographer can with a woman who kept her inner life sealed off from scrutiny. Indeed her preoccupation with surfaces may have been her deepest trait. Joe and Rose Kennedy led separate lives: he pursued ...”

“... there is a resurgence of interest in his work. Five of his novels, two memoirs of the First World War and his collected verse have been reprinted, and his native townland, Glenties in County Donegal, has an annual Patrick MacGill Festival. Writers are now commemorated as often as saints used to be and, like saints, they fall into the categories of the local ...”

“... out of which the tragedy grew. Yad Vashem begins with a room: a full-scale model of a middle-class German-Jewish parlour from between the wars. Visitors can look in through the cut-away wall and see shelves of books, a piano, reproductions of high art. A sign explains that German Jews thought that they could become part of the dominant culture by ...”

“... but these were replaced with berths, and she spent her first few years carrying troops to the Boer War. In 1900 she carried the entire Dublin – Denbigh Imperial Yeomanry, along with their many horses, to the South African coast. The ship was later brought into service on the Beaver Line, a company of ships sailing between England and the prosperous shores of ...”

“... movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe. ‘The true test of a good government,’ Alexander Hamilton wrote, ‘is its aptitude and tendency to produce a ...”

“... Uzodinma Iweala’s short, intense and ambitious first novel, is a rebel soldier in a civil war in an anonymous African country. He has no sense of the cause he is fighting for, or even who his leaders are, beyond his immediate superiors, men he knows only as Commandant and Luftenant. He spends his days ‘walking and fighting and soldiering and ...”

“... founded in the sixth century and destroyed in a German advance in the opening phase of the war. A few window arches and pillars survive. Some of the rubble was used to make a watchtower in what was the nave so that German soldiers had a better view of French troop positions outside Verdun. ‘Do something beautiful,’ Paul Cret, chair of the steering ...”

“... heart condition, the President made key decisions that affected the conduct of the world war and the shape of the postwar world; these were the men who advised him. Have the Sun and the National Enquirer, uninvited guests at the party, spoiled the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s death? Secret Affairs (the story of ...”

“... can make. George Orwell was shot in the neck on 20 May 1937 while fighting in the Spanish Civil War for the POUM (roughly translatable as ‘The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification’). He was six foot two. If he’d been five foot eight the bullet would have gone through his head. If that had happened, what would the world think of him now?We ...”

“... England. Balzac’s great successor, for Lukács, was the towering figure of Tolstoy, whose War and Peace represents a peak simultaneously of the historical and of the realist novel in the 19th century. In societies more advanced than Russia, on the other hand, the development of capitalism had by this time pitted a revolutionary working ...”

“... tasters, but a beautiful pleasure dome filled with works of art connected with wine. During the war he spent eight months in a French military prison in Algiers, returned to France, then escaped on foot across the Pyrenees, joined the Free French forces in England and landed in Normandy just as his elegant first wife was being ‘dragged from her plank bed ...”

“... by dull professionals, and prided themselves on exclusivity and unsociability. During the war, academics had been forced to emerge from their burrows in the Royal Society and the British Academy and contribute to national policymaking, but now they preferred to nap in the library of the Athenaeum. Sampson was so convinced by his argument that he ...”