“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 The art school was destroyed in the war and a few of the houses (the bigger ones in particular) have been replaced by blocks of flats or old people’s homes.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... outsiders, who were determined to escape the suffocating suburban roles expected of women of their class. Anthropology for them was not just an occupation, but a vocation. They came to it as the stance from which to unmask the American society of their time, by pointing to its non-inevitability, its non-naturalness. They did this by presenting their readers ...”

“... that democracy needed ‘the antagonism of opinions’ more than the concerted mouthing of Cold War platitudes which conservative politicians preferred. In post-war France, Raymond Aron saw Tocqueville as the great counter-weight to Marx. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd reminded Americans that Tocqueville had feared ...”

“... less Jamesian: it is a thousand-word-long lament, in which a woman faces the prospect of a nuclear war, and confronts the inadequacy of any possible imagining of it. ‘I could weep for my furniture. The earth will be abashed; the furniture will stand out, balked and shameful in the ruin of everything that was our lives.’ Standing as it does immediately ...”

“... variety of different levels. During the late 18th and 19th centuries, when homely, suburban middle-class values were increasingly thought to be in the ascendant, it seemed altogether appropriate that the monarch should both reflect and embody them. At the same time, the Crown was losing its traditional, public, masculine functions of warrior-king and ...”

“... involving hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people and crossing all boundaries of class, caste and religion.The atmosphere among the protesters was largely peaceful and festive. The government provided the menace. Anurag Thakur, the finance minister, addressed huge rallies of RSS supporters with the chant ‘Desh ke ghaddaron ko, goli maro ...”

“... humans before getting back to Athens and Rome, to Florence, Bruges, Paris and New York. If the class is labelled ‘Art since 1945’, the teleological march will begin in medias res: aesthetic concerns and world-historical events predating the war will be lost in the primordial soup and only a few giant patriarchs will ...”

“... occupiers. Braithwaite wrote two devastating articles in the Financial Times opposing the Iraq War and the atmosphere of fear created by New Labour propaganda but Afgantsy is written in a very different register. The Soviet intervention is seen as a tragedy for both the Russians and the Afghans. The principal aim of Soviet foreign policy in the region had ...”

“... and the small size of its potentially nation-forming elite. There were hardly any middle-class Belarusians and no ‘free peasants’ as in the Baltics or the southern parts of Ukraine. The area was a landlocked backwater and 60 per cent of the people in the provinces of Mogilev and Minsk were serfs when emancipation came in the 1860s. Most towns ...”