“... the remoter outposts of the Habsburg Empire since, as the largest component of the educated middle class in those parts, they were the people who actually used the standard literary German instead of the dialects spoken by the emigrant German diasporas of the East – Swabian, Saxon and (as German philologists confirmed, sometimes not without ...”

“... de Man’s life has come back into view like a return of the repressed. At the same time, race, class, gender, post-colonial and sexuality studies have suggested that the ‘death’ of canonical authors is a way of preserving their authority and shielding them from historical and political questioning. Gordon Millan’s biography of Mallarmé is written as ...”

“... forestalling black protest and Western worry. Among its aims has been to co-opt a black middle class through expanding economic opportunity and the gradual relaxation of petty apartheid: predominantly, it is bourgeois blacks who would be able to take advantage of such changes – significant from the white point of view – in the fabric of South ...”

“... trapped by pseudo-archaic ‘ethnic hatreds’, objects of philanthropy and NGOs or targets of the war on terror. The category of the unemployed has thus expanded to encompass vast ranges of people, from the temporarily unemployed, the no longer employable and permanently unemployed, to the inhabitants of ghettos and slums (all those often dismissed by Marx ...”

“... system is so incompetent that if nothing is done Russia will gradually deteriorate into a second-class power. The ruling class has the alternatives, neither of them very plausible, of accepting relegation or changing the system. There is, however, a third possibility, which is the traditional device of an authoritarian ...”

“... a chilly outside toilet on a dusky evening, the traditional dark colours worn by middle and upper-class women who rarely left the gloom of their deep-eaved houses. Tanizaki had an abhorrence of the well-lit toilet, the distant nocturnal view ruined by urban electric lighting, the white ceramic tableware which took away the mystery from a bowl of ...”

“... no similar action in regard to the Prussian or Austrian forces with whom France was also at war. The reason was that, according to Revolutionary dogma, Prussian and Austrian soldiers were slaves, forced at bayonet point to fight for the loathsome despots who ruled them. The English were different. They were, if not exactly a democracy, still a sovereign ...”

“... Which gets another hare running, since families that magyarised their names before the First World War were often Jewish. So, Misha Danos: a Hungarian background, but not from Hungary; a Latvian who manifested little love for Latvia; Jewish, or maybe not, since he passed most of the war unscathed and unhidden in Riga and ...”

“... Middle East and West Asia, issued a press release reporting that the USS Gravely, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, had shot down two missiles fired by Yemeni Houthis at a US-owned container ship, the MV Maersk Detroit, in the Gulf of Aden. A third Houthi missile had landed in the sea. There was no damage to the ship. The Gravely was part of Operation ...”

“... more deaths, than London. (Something like thirty thousand Londoners were killed by aerial war; Berlin lost about fifty thousand.) And yet when I lived there, I never came across a symbol honouring Berliners for having endured and survived the years of bombardment. ‘Perhaps liberal German writers shy away from [Berlin’s ...”

“... suspicions that, despite official denials, those powers who wanted to intervene in the Civil War were doing so. Of even greater significance was his emphasis on the targeting of civilians: ‘In the form of its execution and the scale of destruction it wrought, the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history. Guernica was not a military ...”

“... the Senate, and told him to run for president. When he won in 2008, Obama went to the head of the class, above the reach of pragmatic advice from people who could have taught him some things. They could have taught him, for one thing, that the Republicans of these years are not placable and will not ‘come around’. The American establishment as a ...”

“... of the practice, though it was largely levelled to make way for a memorial to the Great Patriotic War, built during the last years of the Soviet and the first years of the Russian state: a fantastic piece of kitsch, uncannily representative of the mingling of Communist and nationalist currents in contemporary Russian politics. Moscow was a ...”

“... knowledge, even among the otherwise well-informed, that a high proportion of the Asian business class in Britain are Gujarati, speakers of the language of Gujarat, the mainly Hindu area of North-West India whose most famous son was Mahatma Gandhi. Nor is it well-known that many of these Gujarati belonged to the exodus of Asians from East Africa in the late ...”

“... The investigator was talking to a little seven-year-old, who was the only English child in her class. After all the others had talked about their origins, she said sadly: ‘I come from nowhere.’ We must allow for differences, of course. The Germans were a minority in their state, the English are an overwhelming majority. And terminology comes into ...”