“... the performers ample rewards, as we know from Plato’s Ion. I learned later, from the Preface to War Music, that Logue had undertaken the project at the suggestion of Donald Carne-Ross, who was then commissioning a version of the Iliad for the BBC. I was impressed by the reading, but every now and then found myself at a loss to reconcile what I was hearing ...”

“... one of the ruminative, generalising passages interspersed among the domestic and public scenes in War and Peace (battles, a formal ball, the burning of Moscow and so forth), Tolstoy grapples with the question of what degree of free will a human being of any social class might be supposed to have. The paradoxical conclusion ...”

“... overcrowded camp in Gallipoli funded by the French. France had bet on the wrong side in the Civil War, and was eager to stop supporting the camps. But it would provide a more permanent home for many of the refugees, among them some of Russia’s most important writers. Gazdanov was born in 1903 in St Petersburg, to an upper-middle-...”

“... Europe, and the Byzantine East, where laziness and violence are the rule. Later on, during the war in Bosnia, it was the Bosnian Muslims who were praised for their affinities with the West and for being unlike Muslims elsewhere. Before long, Western newspapers and Balkan nationalists were using much the same language. With complete ...”

“... chosen vocation was wrong-headed in the eyes of her family – nursing was for working-class girls – she waited patiently until her opportunity came. Events provided it. In 1853, after a spell at Kaiserswerth, she was appointed superintendent of the Establishment for Gentlewomen during Illness, located for most of her time there in Upper Harley ...”

“... migration to resettlement – a quarter of the members of the Nation. Two decades later, the Civil War further divided and decimated the Cherokees. Rogers’s father, a slave-owner, like others among the Cherokee élite of mixed Indian and white ancestry, fought with the South; Will was named after a member of the Cherokee Supreme Court who had fought ...”

“... In ‘Such, such were the joys’, George Orwell wrote of their heyday before the First World War in softer tones: ‘crazy millionaires in curly top hats and lavender waistcoats’, champagne parties and slang, ‘chocs and cigs and ripping and topping and heavenly … divvy weekends at Brighton and … scrumptious teas at the Troc’.The Troc ...”

“... walls in Camden Arts Centre, made in situ for one of the rooms, depict acts of genital cruelty and class tyranny remembered by witnesses to the abuse of slaves and told to abolitionists. The results are as disturbing as anything in Goya’s Disasters of War or the Chapman Brothers’ defacings of Goya. Since her earliest ...”

“... in Spies. Flowers play central symbolic roles in both novels, and both are also haunted by war: Hartley’s novel, set at the time of the Boer War, glances forward to the Somme, while Frayn returns to a Second World War childhood. Frayn does more, however, than recycle the ...”

“... Eton, depression at Oxford; job in publishing, deadpan early novels, marriage into the Pakenhams; war service in Northern Ireland and Allied Liaison; postwar triumph with A Dance to the Music of Time? The most striking revelations come where he said least, of his childhood and his loves. The finest thing in Spurling’s book is her delicate portrait of the ...”

“... great proposition’, a phrase taken from the opening scenes of The True Glory, an Anglo-American war documentary produced in 1945. ‘Funny thing,’ an American voice pronounces. ‘On the way over you felt like you were the whole works … but then all over the UK you’d see things that made you begin to realise you were just part of a hell of a big ...”

“... subjects. Kelly’s are the conscientious objectors who refused to fight during the Second World War; Neima’s are the creators of the utopian community of Dartington Hall. Both show how thoughtfully these dissidents weighed individual conviction and social obligation; both think society gained from their choices. These claims are persuasive, and yet they ...”

“... race’ – little more than an apology by a ‘parson of the English State Church’ for his own class interest. At the time he published the Essay, Malthus was indeed a parson – curate of Okewood in Surrey – and if, for Wordsworth, it was just then ‘bliss to be alive’ and ‘very heaven’ to be young, you couldn’t tell that from Malthus’s ...”

“... One possibility is to emphasise capitalism, to explain centralisation by the rise of the middle class, and to speak, like the Soviet historian A.D. Lublinskaya, of the ‘progressive’ role of the monarchy and its alliance with the bourgeoisie. The second option is to emphasise feudal survivals, and to suggest that absolute monarchy came into existence ...”

“... between the two halves of his nature. There was a phase of his youth, before the First World War, in which Keynes gave himself over to love, learning and the arts. These early passions were never abandoned, but gradually they were subsumed into the life of an economic statesman. By 1920, the date at which Skidelsky begins the second volume of his ...”