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“... descended in 2003, initiating the kind of cataclysm that registers in the fossil record. The war left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, most of them civilians. There is still no authoritative count, only estimates with confidence intervals equivalent to tens of thousands of lives. The war’s survivors were forced ...”

“... away. In Stiles’s hands, James is a monomaniac, unable and unwilling to escape the Civil War. To make the argument, Stiles retells the story of the Civil War in Missouri with considerable verve. Roughly the first 150 pages of his book cover the 1850s and early 1860s, when James was a child and adolescent. Even when ...”

“... was ‘A Picture of the Time’, and for the second ‘A Game for the People of Our Time’. The war had come and gone in Europe; vast empires had vanished; short-lived revolutions had come and gone too, although one revolution stayed. Dr Mabuse is clearly the product of this period, a close relative of Dr Caligari, who made his screen appearance in 1919 ...”

“... United States was Victoria College in Cairo, a school in effect created to educate those ruling-class Arabs and Levantines who were going to take over after the British left. My contemporaries and classmates included King Hussein of Jordan, several Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian and Saudi boys who were to become ministers, prime ministers and leading ...”

“... relation between the privacy of his work and his multiple personae? What made an affluent middle-class blow-in Dublin’s favourite satirist? O’Nolan was widely known during his life as the Irish Times’s acid columnist, Myles na gCopaleen, and not as the author of two extraordinary novels. The question arises whether he changed as Dublin changed between ...”

“... reflections on the upheaval around him may even be eloquent in his native Polish. But working-class vernacular must vie with poetry in making things awkward for translators. The hero, for instance, identifies the world around him by homely menagerie nicknames: his workmates are Sloniu the Elephant, Roundy, Swarthy, Foureyes, Skinny, Miskia the ...”

“... of great cities’ which it brought with it, and with the seemingly inexorable rise of working-class consciousness and middle-class democracy, 19th-century historians tend to dismiss rural England in (at worst) a few curt phrases, or (at best) in one obligatory chapter on ‘agriculture’ or ‘the land’. But, as ...”

“... not in Waugh territory, gaping at the raffish pieties of the aristocracy; we are in middle middle-class Catholic England, where sin is an obsession, and sin mostly means sex. So the book is mainly about what happens to the sex life under these particular constraints, the obstacles to its expression, the contortions to which it is subjected. This is done with ...”

“... Paul as a child – hardly holy, but something regarded as a harmless sport among middle and upper-class males, so I’m given to understand – and he seems also to have referred to him, always, as ‘the Powlie’, which must have been annoying for the young fellow, at the very least. But then Betjeman always enjoyed name-calling and was a great one for the ...”

“... the 14th century, but which became prominent in the 19th, before fading away after the First World War. It was used mainly by wealthy families intent on demonstrating that one of their members was incapable of managing his affairs. Women, too, were sometimes subjected to commissions in lunacy, but less often, since married women were not held to have property ...”

“... the devil she should have held out for greater imaginative powers. It’s hardly a revelation that War and Peace and Ulysses have more prestige than the Harry Potter books, but no one has ever had as intense a relationship with those novels as the ten-year-olds a decade ago did with Rowling’s series – the children who would only say ‘you-know-who’ for ...”

“... him 1.5 pfennigs for every kilo of ammonia produced using his process. In the last year of the war, the factories in Oppau and Leuna produced 115,000 tons, and Haber’s royalty payments were worth the present-day equivalent of about $4 million. Haber won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918; Bosch became chairman of BASF, which made huge amounts of money ...”

“... took arms against Britain in 1775 resignedly. He was 43, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War and a participant in the Atlantic economy. He had made his name (and his fortune) in the early 1750s, inheriting a plantation from his half-brother Lawrence and leading military expeditions intended to prise the Ohio Country from the French and their Native ...”

“... the world when the Third Reich was new? Before September 1939 and even after the Second World War began, the West was full of enablers and apologists. Hitler’s American admirers included Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst and Charles Lindbergh. General Motors, DuPont and IBM did business with the Nazis. So did MGM. It’s no shock to see democratic ...”

“... Few people now remember that for many months after the First World War ended in November 1918 the blockade of Germany, where the population was already on the edge of starvation, was maintained with full rigour. By the following spring, the German authorities were projecting a 50 per cent increase in the infant mortality rate ...”