“... It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese ...”

“... never brigaded, by Surrealism, he came to occupy a position apart in the literary scene after the war, shunning its conventions and connections. A teacher for 35 years in secondary schools, all his work – which crossed many genres – was produced by a small editor, antithesis of the publishing establishment in Paris. In 1951 he refused the Goncourt Prize ...”

“... of arthritis in my ankle, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do.7 January, Yorkshire. On the war memorial at Malham is the inscription:Live thou for EnglandWe for England diedI don’t know if this is a quotation, or an injunction that was, as it were, custom-made, but I find it – if only slightly – misplaced, and I don’t wholly concur, as the ...”

“... was one of many traits his son inherited. Yeats’s school record would have dismayed most middle-class parents – in a class of 13 boys he was 12th in classics, 12th in modern languages, and 13th in maths and English. So for academic as well as financial reasons there was no hope of his following the family tradition and ...”

“... Latino equivalent of the NAACP, and little overriding ethnic consciousness even among the working class, despite the wishful speculations of progressive intellectuals like Davis about the creation of a militant Pan-Americanism, on the model of the Caribbean diaspora in London. Latinos abroad are scarcely more homogeneous than they were back home, in their ...”

“... I acquired an absurdly fearsome reputation among some of the toughest drinking men of working-class London, though of course I, as messenger, was only the medium through which deference was shown to Mollie, whose hospitality towards assorted wandering Irish, British and Polish souls was legendary. The parties would often go on until the small ...”

“... had won so few seats in the elections. In 1996, they went underground and launched a ‘People’s War’, demanding sweeping reforms. Thousands of lives and much anguish later, only two of their demands turned out to be non-negotiable. One was the abolition of the 240-year-old monarchy, the other a new constitution drafted by an elected assembly. What made ...”

“... period of silence from you would be welcome’; Earl Attlee travelling to the Lords by third-class rail and Tube; Attlee allowing himself to be canvassed in 1966 by Labour students who didn’t recognise him, just nodding and saying, ‘Already a member’ – and so on. Given that he was fated to preside over six years (1945-51) of stringent ...”

“... in 1899 to South Africa, under the tutelage of George Wyndham, Under-Secretary of State for War. In the Boer War he distinguished himself in some of the hardest fighting, and eventually became ADC to Lord Roberts. Meanwhile, his grandfather had died and he inherited the dukedom. He came home to marry his childhood ...”

“... to Europe, but to mankind in general, to find a way of bringing to an end the Hobbesian chaos of war between nations with its casual massacres of civilians and organised slaughter on the battlefield. Mazower’s glum conclusion, reached almost before his book has begun, is that ‘we have moved from an era that had faith in the idea of international ...”

“... is inadvertently reminded of television’s ‘Just Say No’ anti-drugs ads. Disillusioned post-war Movement writers were always delighted to tell their more exotic predecessors where they could go and shove it, and as a reviewer in the late Forties and early Fifties Enright could be every bit as ferocious as ‘ape-neck Amis’ and the rest. His ...”

“... to get back at their supercilious, ironic and knowing elders. The stakes in the perennial tug-of-war between students and professors have risen to dizzying new heights. Enter Professor Bromwich stage right and Professor Graff stage left. Confronted with the political morality play of John and Carol, Bromwich would hardly be surprised: he abhors everything ...”

“... Institute to London in the Thirties; and by all accounts, transformed the Courtauld from a high-class finishing-school to a world centre for the training of academics and other professionals which had no institutional competition until the Sixties. As time went on, Blunt had wide influence in every aspect of the administration of culture in England. Yet he ...”

“... spend her last quarter-century in the London which had always been the Mecca of her late-colonial class; until then, from World War One to 1937, she was a leader of Sydney society, dabbling in galleries and little magazines as well as high-powered charities. Marr lets her emerge as a comic character of gorgeous ...”

“... Roosevelt had already made it quite clear that the price of the United States’s entry into the war in Europe was that the British should give up their empire. In consequence, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out in his matchless Blood, Class and Nostalgia (1990), the British underwent a massive and soul-gelding ...”