“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to make this a better world’). Her politics is normally more than reasonable, but this recent war has played havoc with her judgment. She is not alone. As I get close to the town, military radio lists a host of northern locations and instructs their inhabitants to make for shelters and safe places, an announcement whose wisdom is confirmed by the heavy ...”

“... of British writers (those, like Auden and Isherwood, too young to serve in the First World War) suffered from this. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, their main impetus for engaging with it, at the front or in print, was anti-Fascism. But there was also a sense of atonement: a belated opportunity to stand up and ...”

“... the Creole childhood in Martinique, volunteering to fight for the Free French in the Second World War, his career in Lyon as arrogant young psychiatrist, the part he played in the war in Algeria, the encounters with Nkrumah and Lumumba, his death at the age of 36 – to realise that his is a voice coming to us from a ...”

“... to ‘rack-renting’, defined as ‘to raise rent above a fair or normal amount’. In times of war or other emergencies, the ‘profiteer’ is soon identified, defined as ‘one who makes excessive profits esp. illegally or in black-market conditions’. The​ history of taxation is a rich field for studying such changing and inchoate, but ...”

“... US army lieutenant-colonel much admired in military history circles for his books about World War Two, knows a real soldier when he sees one, and on most counts Churchill doesn’t measure up. He was certainly fascinated by soldiering from an early age – it was his toy soldiers, he claimed, that did it – but he seems to have gone to Sandhurst only ...”

“... much in the way of liberal democracy, secular ethics, a skilled, politically conscious working class, suburban amenities or abstract expressionism. This time-warped situation is reflected in the dominant political current of traditional Ireland: nationalism. Nations are fairly recent contrivances, but the ideology of the movements which fight to establish ...”

“... participating symbolically, it is playing to win.’ With an activist core among younger middle-class Chileans, the Broad Front is now in an alliance with the Communist Party, giving it a formidable base across Chilean society.Every Friday night a ritual plays out on Santiago’s Plaza Baquedano. The surrounding streets fill with tear gas. Small bands of ...”

“... to be seen as a ‘problem’. Enoch Powell prophesied ‘rivers of blood’ and white working-class fascists shaved their heads. A series of Immigration Acts was passed, dividing families, stemming the flow. Most of the migrant workers had originally meant to stay a few years; go back with some money. But it didn’t often work out that way. Most of them ...”

“... the stampede from Thatcherism. Scotland sought its protection in the traditions and certainties of class loyalty, rather than in the adventurism and risks of constitutional change. In that spring moment, Scotland’s nationalism revealed itself as a fragile bloom. I am not sure whether R.H. Campbell has found the entire reason for this frailty in his essay on ...”

“... the boy on the unicorn in Forty Acres and a Unicorn (2007) – a reference to the unrealised Civil War promise to grant freed families ‘forty acres and a mule’ – is all-consuming. It’s not clear whether the boy is emerging from or being swallowed back into the dark swathe of disappointed history. A horizon, barely visible, gives the unicorn a ground to ...”

“... idea of what a good husband should be. Contrasted with this, Zeina’s marriage (Zeina is a lower-class foil for Aisha and Marianne, both Egyptian women inhabiting the world of half-European attitudes, foreign travel and university learning) is consummated in ritual fashion with the bridegroom’s bandaged finger brutally deflowering her in full view of her ...”

“... shaped by mass entertainment. ‘Each action taken by the Department of Justice, as well as the war crimes commissions considered by the President and the Department of Defense,’ the Attorney General John Ashcroft has just declared in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, ‘is carefully drawn to target a narrow ...”

“... This changed with the opening of the first purpose-built dance halls after the First World War, intended to cater to a lower-middle and working-class public whose wages were rising and who were eager to hear the new jazz music performed live. The new halls, constructed in every major town and city in the country ...”