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“... comparison: the vast scale, the humanity, the panorama of families in a land incessantly at war. Perhaps, they venture, this is the War and Peace of our own times. Well, it’s not. A modern work of that Tolstoyan sweep did arrive in our times, but it was written by a different Grossman: Life and Fate, Vasily ...”

“... Hyndford Street is a brick-built working-class row looking like hundreds of others. Yet it is to this terrain that the almost unbearable nostalgia of Van Morrison’s music always returns. The outside world now mainly sees Protestant Belfast in terms of Ian Paisley Snr, a man who believes that bridges are built primarily to let the Devil in ...”

“... fairly extensively.’ Like a tutor she tells him all about it, starting with Descartes’s war service in Holland. We could re-title this book after Denis Johnson’s play, The old lady says ‘No!’ All the same, Matthieu Galey (perhaps faux-naif) does elicit a good deal of information with his mistakes and his provoking questions. He even tempts ...”

“... I first studied Herodotus seriously in the years immediately following the Second World War, my overriding impression was of a man both broad-minded and cosmopolitan; fascinated by the infinite varieties of human nature; surprisingly alert to the influence of women in history, which I’ve always thought of as the subtext, by no means always ...”

“... nomination in 1968 by saying he’d been ‘brainwashed’ by generals who told him the Vietnam War could be won. Last month his son Mitt arrived in Tampa persecuted for being a millionaire 250 times over, accused of sacrificing American workers on the altar of his own wealth, his status as a human the subject of national doubt. I went to Tampa that ...”

“... and Bartlett explores it at length in a first chapter ranging from Herodotus to the Crimean War. The city was heavily bombarded by the British fleet, and Chekhov’s father and mother (he was not yet born) moved inland to escape the danger. At this time Tolstoy was writing his Sevastopol Sketches, and Bartlett suggests (no reference is given) that many ...”

“... wrote in 1923, as illustrated newspapers were bringing Tutankhamun back to life. The First World War was over, but its aftershocks rippled on. Golden treasure, a boy pharaoh and lost tombs in the Valley of the Kings offered readers an escape. The inscrutable Orient and its discovery by the West made for a familiar storyline – a myth to meet the needs of ...”

“... Cabral, an Argentinian, using the form of a vals criollo, a dance favoured by the Peruvian working class. Piaf heard it and asked one of her librettists, Michel Rivgauche, to compose new French lyrics. It isn’t hard to see why it appealed to her, musically and thematically. She had always been good at milking nostalgia – ‘chanson’ itself is a wistful ...”

“... Brew (1976), or from the epically painful In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) to the working-class soap Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1973) and the TV variety show Like a Bird on a Wire (1975). It is an oeuvre so vast that Penman calls it ‘an entire town, region, conurbation, country; die Fassbinderrepublik’. Its revolving cast of actors and the ...”

“... by self-containment. Vic does act on the Great World, and becomes a player in the Australian post-war mining and property boom. As he lies dying he thinks back to his childhood: He was in his own nine-year-old body again, standing barefoot in old serge pants and braces ... One of those occasions when, in the assurance that he had the power to leap out of ...”

“... who came of age and went to the university in the thirty years between 1919, the end of the Great War, and 1949 – or, say, 1951’, by which date all who had served in the war had returned to the university. So constituent members of Our Age need to be over sixty and could be over ninety. Secondly, there is an obvious ...”

“... drive down wages and living standards in the West for decades, until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up’. As a result, ‘the next generation will be poorer than this one; the old economic model is broken and cannot revive growth.’ Those places which, in their different ways, have managed to insulate themselves ...”

“... which primitive societies were egalitarian and the agricultural revolution brought a new order of class and domination. He wanted to show that life wasn’t really like that: there were always multiple, contending possibilities. Stories of a human fall from Edenic bliss ‘simply aren’t true; have dire political implications; make the past needlessly ...”

“... my job. It wouldn’t matter whether or not we got our new foreign client. The next day I have a class to teach. I am late so I book a taxi through an agency. The driver is a young man with an Iranian-assembled Peugeot. The Iranian car industry is dominated by French technology, thanks mainly to the US trade embargo. French manufacturers have licensed their ...”

“... of E.W. Godwin, later to those of Norman Shaw and others. The art school was destroyed in the war and a few of the houses (the bigger ones in particular) have been replaced by blocks of flats or old people’s homes. But you can still drink your pint in the Tabard surrounded by De Morgan and Walter Crane tiles or sit on green Norman Shaw pews in the ...”