“... during his first four years of study. In the fifth, though, he dropped out of the top ranks of his class and by the summer of 1869 he had withdrawn and abandoned his hopes of the priesthood. He enrolled in the law faculty (which was easier to get into) at St Petersburg University and then – in a move common for ambitious but underqualified defectors from the ...”

“... or unclouded, and that Mrs Thatcher was, with one exception, the least well-regarded of all post-war prime ministers escaped him. Most of the book consists of extracts from Urban’s diary, which tell of the help he and other academics gave to the Prime Minister in the writing of her speeches and the formation of her attitudes. Few political speeches merit ...”

“... Imperial point of view. However, the fruits of his political time were mixed: exhilaration at a war won and despair at a peace lost. It is appropriate that the first letter included in this volume should complain about Robert Buchanan, who had found in Kipling’s work ‘all that is most deplorable, all that is most retrograde and savage, in the restless ...”

“... the door and looked in apologetically. We must have been conscripted at the same point in the war, but being older he had already been up at Oxford: now he was a graduate, starting a BLitt. Since he was already quite famous in university circles I knew who he was although we had never met. I remember being impressed by his clothes. In those days after the ...”

“... study of the Brontës, an autobiographical account of her time with a nursing unit in World War One and scores of short stories, essays and poems. Her great literary works tell of the inner lives of quiet women – Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922) – and of the shattering effects of ...”

“... word in the playground was that the thief had been inspired by an essay of mine, read out to the class by the soon-to-be-offended party himself; it was entitled, fairly unambiguously: ‘The Day I Stole the Teacher’s Stick’. Today, however, he was exercised by another sort of crime, a cultural betrayal of which we were all, apparently, guilty. Did we not ...”

“... death at the Somme, but in fact George had resented the outbreak of the Second South African War as an interruption to his shooting (family funerals ditto), and he kept up the slaughter during the First World War, sending pheasants as gifts to military hospitals.Marriage was another refuge from inanition. Since Mary of ...”

“... As seen​ by the English-speaking world, the Spanish Civil War was a screen on which certain images could be projected, images of harsh sunlight, moral clarity and sacrifice. It was an emblematic, almost allegorical war and a test case for conscience, a political crisis so thoroughly appropriated that the Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse hardly needed to point out that its contributors were overwhelmingly outsiders: it was the war that was Spanish, not the poetic response ...”

“... throughout the Arab East’. While the Israeli Communist Party commemorated the 1948 Arab-Israeli War as a struggle for national independence, Matzpen, which broke from the CPI in 1962, viewed it as a campaign of ethnic cleansing (or tihour, the term used by Zionist forces at the time). In fact it was both – but only Matzpen had the courage to speak of ...”

“... Simplicius. Very strong affinities of atmosphere connect the Germany of the Thirty Years War, which Grimmelshausen portrayed, with the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s which is the obsessive concern of Grass’s ‘Danzig Trilogy’. These are affinities which are not encompassed by Mann’s imagination, or by the imagination of many writers of ...”

“... in north-west Syria. Her husband was killed in March while fighting on the government side in the war, her mother and father are dead, and she is the youngest in her impoverished family. ‘When my husband was killed, I was pregnant,’ she said, ‘and my parents-in-law decided to keep me with them and marry me to my husband’s youngest brother, which is ...”

“... background a society not primarily as a set of economic classes but as a patriarchy. The English class system, its pervasiveness, its endless subtleties, had once been a rich source for the English novel. The system whose laws, customs, religion and culture consistently sanction the economic ascendancy of one sex over another could be a still richer ...”

“... book appeared. Walzer focuses on his opposition to America’s entry into the First World War. Then comes Martin Buber, whose chapter concerns itself with his relations to the emergent state of Israel. Next we have a famous Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, and a famous Italian ex-Communist, Ignazio Silone. After this, George Orwell is discussed ...”

“... of period emanates from the poems in Part Two of this volume – ‘Mainly from The Middle of a War (1942) and A Lost Season (1944)’: There is a hard thin gun on Clapham Common. Deserted yachts in the mud at Greenwich. In a hospital at Ealing notices Which read WOMEN GASSED and WOMEN NOT GASSED. This is that curious first winter of the ...”

“... somewhere to complete their life-cycle. My father went out to West Africa during the Second World War. He was in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was based in Lagos, Jos in Northern Nigeria (where they grow strawberries and new potatoes on the plateau all year round) and in the Gold Coast. We have a picture of him, very young and thin, sitting on a cane chair ...”