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“... United States and on his return found England ‘miserably smoky and narrow’, because it was so class-bound.This zest for the modern helped to give Rosebery his huge public appeal. When he became prime minister, he not only had Granny’s chamberpot removed, he installed electric lighting in Downing Street (resisted by Gladstone) and insisted on typewriters ...”

“... so as to be able to move to Prague), he calls her ‘my human tribunal’. During the First World War, Kafka repeatedly begs his superiors at work to release him from his job so he can become a soldier; but as he later writes in his diary, he doesn’t go too far; he never becomes a soldier. Nor does he marry the next woman he asks to marry him, or the one ...”

“... Winston Churchill​ was the dominant personality on the allied side in the Second World War: not the leader of the most important belligerent, nor even the most influential warlord in the Grand Alliance, but the most significant human being. His prodigious literary skills afterwards enabled him, thanks to the writing, publication and long-lasting celebrity of his war memoirs, immensely to distort the conflict’s historiography ...”

“... or not) by reference to recent liberation from foreign rule, the Germans can celebrate their post-war resurgence and re-union, the Americans can coalesce around a particular version of the War of Independence, and even around a nostalgic interpretation of their Civil War, but contemporary ...”

“... episode that became the subject of a poem by Longfellow. The maternal line included heroes of the War of Independence and cousins who fought on opposing sides in the Civil War, all the way down to Wendy’s father, a Coast Guard admiral. The Snowdens were 17th-century Quaker settlers in Maryland and the name was still ...”

“... is grateful but still keeps her distance from Dallas, and some viewers are disappointed to find no class reconciliation, no personal acknowledgment on Lucy’s part of Dallas as her equal. But Stagecoach does enact a break in hierarchy, an opening towards equality on the frontier. It is not resigned to inequality but knows that equality is difficult to ...”

“... airfield in neighbouring Wisconsin, the wrong alarm went off – one indicating that a nuclear war had begun. The pilots of nuclear-armed interceptors had got their planes almost ready when the mistake was realised. The intruder turned out to be a bear. And then there are asteroids. It’s only a matter of time before Earth is hit, Clarke warns, so ‘a ...”

“... portraiture at least hinted at illustration. When in the 19th century commercial illustrators – war reporters, poster artists, advertisement makers, lithographic cartoonists, Punch illustrators – took to the field and began to represent modern life, a few artists tried running with them. Of those who wanted to get their teeth into it Henri de ...”

“... In American​ popular memory, the Second World War remains the ‘good war’, fought, to borrow the title of Tom Brokaw’s 1998 book, by the ‘greatest generation’. It is remembered as a time of national unity that not only destroyed tyrannies overseas but assimilated young men from all regions and ethnic backgrounds into a shared American identity ...”

“... were brought in the US on behalf of people who had worked as forced and slave labourers during the war, as well as claimants against various German insurance companies and banks. Hundreds of lawyers and functionaries representing clients with divergent interests came up with a schedule of payments with which no one was happy. By the time the fund was ...”

“... the most massive popular upheaval to have occurred in a developing country since the Second World War. Within a period of a few months the Middle East’s most powerful military autocrat and the West’s most trusted ally in the region had been overthrown by an unarmed but disciplined crowd of citizens acting under the instructions of their religious ...”

“... live in … the Red Army in the light of Islamic State? Stalin shadowed by Xi Jinping? The Civil War replayed on the oilfields of Kirkuk? Trump as a yet more disgusting Rasputin? The timeframe that has mattered most in the year’s celebrations is not the century, but the years gone by since the Fall of the Wall. If the best way to make sense of the ...”

“... visible Astor occupation. With an exaggerated version of the anglophilia common to his age and class, William Waldorf declared America unfit to be the home of a gentleman and bought Cliveden from the Duke of Westminster for $1.25 million in 1893, later adding Hever Castle in Kent to his country addresses and dividing his London time between a magnificent ...”

“... In the beginning, they recovered two sets of voices. The first were those of the British working class, all but silenced by the trade union leaders, ‘sergeants of dead souls’, as Anderson now describes them, who delivered block votes at the Conference and thence to the executive committee of a party most of whose other active members had settled for the ...”

“... know how to speak.’ He paused. ‘But she’s learning.’ Wieners was born to a working-class family outside Boston in 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina. His reverence for the Virgin folded easily into his adoration of Hollywood’s golden age stars. But ...”