“... from Algeria, having left for metropolitan France and become cut off from North Africa by the war. (Henceforth, apart from occasional visits, Algeria would remain a distant prospect, on which he gazed with ever greater dismay.) By 1943 he was living in Paris and working for Gallimard. In the last five months of the German occupation he was also running ...”

“... of ‘the Jewish community’. And in the East End of London, the elemental problems of working-class life – birth, survival and death – were essentially the same, regardless of ethnic identity or national origin. If it is difficult to define the Anglo-Jewish community satisfactorily at any given moment, then by definition it is even harder to write its ...”

“... Guardsman William Humphrey Griffiths of the British Army, both recruited from German prisoner-of-war camps. While broadcasting for Büro S, they lived in an apartment in Berlin, wore civilian clothes, were provided with supplies of tobacco and alcohol and, if they liked, were escorted once a week to a nearby brothel.The announcers of Büro S thus lived quite ...”

“... Donald Rumsfeld, you could say, has had a remarkable career, stretching from a middle-class upbringing amid wealthier neighbours on the edge of Chicago, through Congress and high office in the Nixon and Ford administrations, including a spell as secretary of defense, a profitable excursion into business, and finally six tumultuous years heading the Pentagon under George W ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... English Language; and starting the university’s American studies programme. At Yale before the war, Angleton had been a mediocre student, but he’d founded a literary magazine, Furioso, made a pilgrimage to Pound at his villa in Rapallo, and booked the poet’s 1939 tour of the United States. An undergraduate after the ...”

“... 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 ...”