“... the ruin of his life, the wreck of the world around him in the aftermath of a ghastly civil war, and the doubt whether the old apathetic stagnation or the new conscienceless greed is worse. But I have made these stories seem more sombre than they are. An unlovely world, but much of it is rendered with affection; and there is immense satisfaction for the ...”

“... English.’ Bowie’s work, like Chaplin’s, seems to have been affected by this sort of girlish class-consciousness. He was drawn away from the old-fashioned Gay Scene into the novel world of the Arts Labs, where a youth could be easily bisexual. He was influenced by an American record producer, Tony Visconti, a man, say the Gillmans, of ‘discernibly ...”

“... All was not idyllic for the little society of professors’ children; there were the working-class boys, the ‘muckers’, given to ‘fighting, rock-throwing and jeering’ as a way of demonstrating what Professor Kennedy elegantly calls ‘upward social mobility’. Summers were spent away from these distractions, in a farmhouse owned by the family in ...”

“... with the emergent blues and improvised music developed by African-Americans after the First World War, ragtime represents a quite different mode. It is essentially a written music for the piano. In fact, most of the classical ragtime composers insisted that it be played as written, preferably at a moderate to slow tempo. Joplin despised the crowd-pleasing ...”

“... of documents in the National Archives to illuminate the drama of emancipation during the Civil War, has profoundly affected how scholars interpret that era. The first volume, on black soldiers, made it impossible to write about the conflict without taking into account how their service changed its nature. Succeeding volumes have examined the complex causes ...”

“... himself, as quoted by Warburton: So there I was in the Beaux-Arts, I’d finished my second class and had two valeurs in premier class. And here came out this absolutely staggering book, unreadable, but fabulous: Vers une architecture. So all these things we were doing wasn’t really architecture. So said ...”

“... He persuaded the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Santa Fe Railroad to try it. By the outbreak of war in 1914, oil was being used to power tanks, trucks and planes; it was clear that control of its supply would be central to future geopolitical considerations. Doheny (who had by that point expanded his operations into Mexico) emerged from the ...”

“... of the city’s population directly. Yet it threatened to bring about a barricaded super-class whose power would restore cliffs of social difference higher than those of Victorian London, at a time when the city’s relatively brief importance as a centre of big manufacture was ending, and when its democratic self-government had been abolished in a ...”

“... daubed in white paint leave no doubt as to the nationality of the perpetrators of this act of war on the retreating Iraqi convoy. ‘I love Chicago,’ proclaims a four-ton truck skewed in the sand at a crazy angle. Another hand has written ‘HIGHWAY CHILD’ on the door of a gutted saloon. At the bottom of the hill a British soldier clearly went to some ...”

“... just before his entire company was killed. The injury to his leg, which took him out of the war, occurred a couple of weeks before Passchendaele, which none of his comrades survived. It is axiomatic that in such circumstances survivors do not feel lucky; they feel cursed. Her mother’s nursing saved her father’s life, or so he said; but this is not ...”

“... which demanded that Germany be humiliated and punished: a demand partially satisfied by a ‘war-guilt’ article in the Treaty and its reparations clauses. In a chapter of The Aftermath significantly titled ‘Demos’, Churchill later recalled how difficult it was for him and the other ministers to avoid being pushed further than they knew they ought ...”

“... door. Crypts and tombstones across the graveyard were pockmarked with bullet holes from the civil war and the years that followed; specific gravestones seemed to have been targeted.A volunteer called David Ramírez López found a pistol bullet in the grave. He held it up for the others to see. The lead had been flattened by impact into a squat, pluglike shape ...”

“... The more Toby is admitted to the inner councils of government, the greater his abhorrence of the war about to happen. He rates it illegal, immoral and doomed. His discomfort is compounded by the knowledge that even the most supine of his schoolfriends are out on the street protesting their outrage. So are his parents who, in their Christian socialist ...”

“... Childe Harold makes for Greece via the Spanish peninsula, the most recent theatre of the long war against France which followed the French Revolution. As the Vietnam War demonstrated in modern times, nothing so divides and demoralises the Western intellectual as a war against a ...”

“... of malheur (‘misery’ or ‘affliction’), the exploitation of workers, of power, violence, war, duties and the need for roots – transfigures all this. Weil writes about her experiences with luminous clarity. Her austere and difficult life lends authority to her thinking in a way other intellectuals can only dream of.Yet that life depended to an ...”