“... white-looking; Shan, Guna and Rajan in the kitchen are Sri Lankan Tamils, refugees from the civil war working illegally while they wait for their asylum applications to be processed. Behind the bar, a ‘dark portal’ leads up to the first-floor flat where the chefs ‘seal themselves off’ to sleep every night after their shifts; in emergencies, when the ...”

“... which Kipling much admired, it is a tale about a virtuous spinster companion during the Great War, whose employer’s nephew in the RFC is killed on a training flight. Having brought him up, Mary is very devoted to him. Later a little girl in the village is horribly killed when a house collapses, perhaps as a result of a German bomb. Further upset, Mary ...”

“... Property-owning and picaresque were once upon a time in opposition, but the new middle-class diaspora has changed all that. People want to put down roots where they wander, buy themselves a piece of the view and a share of the sky, a place of their own. Marvellous time. Wish I was here. We don’t simply holiday and go home, we dream in brick and stucco and terracotta ...”

“... sacred space. The promise to sponsor ‘the greatest peacetime event since the Second World War’ brought the Olympics to Atlanta. Using his skills as a real-estate lawyer, Billy Payne conjured away the climate (hot and humid); the transportation problems (the decaying, underfunded infrastructure of a sprawling suburban metropolitan area that had never ...”

“... He was a musician who called himself Edmund Crispin when writing detective stories. The upper-class detective, necessary to the genre in those days, was Gervase Fen, a professor of English at Oxford. The novels were popular; I suppose I enjoyed them too, but I’ve just tried rereading one and wonder how this could have been. It is irredeemably ...”

“... the long 18th century emphasises the transformation of Hanoverian England – an imperial state at war for much of the period – as the fiscal and military demands of the country’s foreign policy wrought a domestic revolution in finance and banking, invigorated Parliament as public consent was required for increasing levels of tax revenue, and obliged the ...”

“... the leading candidate. This is his fourth presidential run. In 2005 he courted the urban middle-class liberal vote, running around the city wearing Ray-Bans and posing with his plane. Nobody was persuaded. Today that social stratum is completely alienated from politics and Qalibaf long ago dropped the pretence of being interested in their vote.There is one ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is also systemic and coercive, and so is race. And feminists need to engage with all of this, with class and race, land enclosure and industrialisation, colonialism and the slave trade, if only out of solidarity with the less privileged sisters. And yet, the strange thing is how often they haven’t: Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed votes for freedmen; Betty ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... valleys of South Wales, to which he returned after a spell as a medical man in the Spanish Civil War. His ambitions were civilian. She, though a successful professional photographer, had been in contact with the Soviet services since 1926 and appears to have been an active recruiter of agents from Kim Philby on, including, it would seem, Broda, then one of ...”

“... acquired autonomy, refused to accept a subsidiary role, and the two sides were suddenly at war. The results have been catastrophic, especially in Darfur. The main road west from El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, was abandoned by travellers during the war in the region twenty years ago. The needle-like jebels ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”