“... 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 ...”

“... The uprising was known as the Sepoy Mutiny and, later, somewhat romantically, as the First War of Independence. Although its impact on the Indian and Anglo-Indian middle classes was probably not as immediate and direct as it has been made out to be in subsequent colonial and nationalist narratives, it brought to an end a period of cultural exchange ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... work, ‘pulling books’. To those who chose this career path more deliberately she belongs to a class of ‘feral librarians’ lacking the proper academic background. It’s a delicious phrase, exemplary in showing that a professional insult can retain a faint flavour of the collegial. At work in the library, which is part of a university, she can pursue ...”

“... 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 ‘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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the story of Evans, half-submerged in a group biography of fellow survivors and alien torturers; a war story, half-lost in the subsequent peaceful and prosperous career of a national celebrity, a medical man and a ladies’ man; a brutal, cartoonish war novella, swallowed in prequel and long finish. The big losers are scale ...”

“... It​ was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army. He deserved a fanfare.’ This is how Aaron Copland explained his Fanfare for the Common Man, composed in 1942 for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. If any theme links the books discussed here, it is the victory of the ‘common man’ – as represented by English and Welsh archers – on the battlefield of Agincourt, over the chivalric aristocracy of France ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”