“... during the battle. Under an apple tree in Cassino, Melville placed a cigarette in the mouth of a young man who’d been shot. ‘He took two drags and then he died. Imagine, springtime in the Italian countryside … and here is this young man dying at twenty. Reality always surpasses cinema in war films.’ Demobilised in ...”

“... looking for tickets. The audience was strange; in general in New York an audience is either young or old (in the Lincoln Center, mainly old), black or white (in the Lincoln Center, almost exclusively white), gay or straight (in the Lincoln Center it is often hard to tell). The audience for James Baldwin that evening could not be so easily ...”

“... the ‘Men in White’ – has given way to an ever more circumscribed stratum, a process which Michael Barr, the leading historian of modern Singapore, examines in rich detail. The well-oiled pistons of the market-state are increasingly accompanied by the creaks and squabbles of a Chinese dynasty. The country’s prized state companies are overrun by ...”

“... a UN colleague told her. ‘You have the courage of your connections!’) Marriage – to Michael Aris, a scholar of Tibet and a friend of the Gore-Booths – deferred but did not dispel this sense of unfulfilled destiny, which was evident in letters written during their courtship. I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help ...”

“... shabab first,’ answered Wadie, ‘but we’ll have to wait till the afternoon.’ The shabab (‘young men’) are Wadie’s wards, a group of six young Gaza men, most of them Ibrahim’s former students at Bir Zeit, now living illegally on the West Bank. It is one of the many ironies of the peace process that Palestinians ...”

“... that it succeeded at Lenin’s expense, a triumphant negation of Lenin’s success. Back in 1984, Michael Scammell wrote a fine warts-and-all biography of Solzhenitsyn which was forced to end on a note of uncertainty. Had Solzhenitsyn blown his great international success of the 1970s by retreating into angry exile in Vermont to write a multi-volume epic of ...”

“... specialising in industrial sculpture (the next Richard Serra, even), started to make it his home. Young Jared took pleasure in the neighbourhood, dirty and dangerous as it was, with homeless people and intravenous drug users camping out in Tompkins Square Park, and was surprised when a contingent of protesters trying to storm the Christodora during the riots ...”

“... minds of that third-rate decade, the Sixties’ – betrayed a shaky grasp of cultural history. (Michael Foot’s description of Tebbit as ‘a semi-house-trained polecat’ may have revealed an equally shaky grasp of natural history, yet still seemed nearer the mark.) There was no pleasing either side in that divided decade: Arthur Scargill was as hostile ...”

“... journal Our Time, and Geoffrey Matthews, later a Shelley scholar. When they tried to join the Young Communist League their letters were intercepted and the police summoned to interview them in the head’s study. The Thompsons’ neighbours in Boars Hill, the Carritts, had seven children and when one of the daughters died, the five brothers and their ...”

“... to police violence against black people, but the protests against the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray were mostly confined to the cities in which the deaths had occurred. Obama was seen as sympathetic to BLM’s concerns, even if he offered little more than memorable speeches. Floyd’s death not only follows the killings of Breonna ...”

“... Rioja of vanilla and muscat (uniquely) of grapes. Beyond that, it seems to be a lottery. The young Samuel Pepys tried mightily to be accounted a connoisseur, but all he could find to say of the Château Haut-Brion that so tickled his fancy was that it ‘hath a good and most particular taste which I never before encountered’. My feinschmecking wife ...”

“... allies. England recognised John IV and the toddler Catherine was suggested as a bride for the young Prince Charles. But England was on the brink of its own wars, and soon Charles I would be tried and executed. During the period of England’s republic, Portugal tried to remain neutral, keen to keep trading with England and keep a fellow enemy of Spain on ...”

“... untrammelled by international institutions. Trumpeting Bush’s pre-emptive assault on Iraq, Michael Ignatieff recommended in 2003 a new American empire whose ‘grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known’.The United States, Power asserted as Obama’s nominee for US ...”

“... I feel at least, that he [Sainte-Beuve] is a man of the past, of a dead generation; and that we young Americans are (without cant) men of the future… We are Americans born – il faut en prendre son parti. I look upon it as a great blessing; and I think that to be an American is an excellent preparation for culture. Five years later, he wrote to Charles ...”

“... the first African-American nominee, but rather to deride, with soporific sarcasm, Obama the young whippersnapper and his belief in ‘change’. A bizarre line from McCain’s speech has already become a six-second YouTube classic: ‘We should be able to deliver bottled hot water to dehydrated babies.’ Watching Obama speak, I found it hard to believe ...”