“... authority of the City banks that had been so influential in the 1920s and before the First World War. Free trade was abandoned: Britain became a protected and cartelised economy. These governments were often suspicious of the state and believed in balanced budgets, but even so they nationalised mining royalties, brought the national grid under public control ...”

“... functioning majorities of power with a minority share of the vote, and a permanently empowered class of politicians and civil servants. When you make this point to anyone involved in active politics, they always, always say the same thing: ‘What about capital punishment?’ The idea being that if more power was given to the proles, the nation’s ...”

“... only ever wanted to grow up to be an army Ranger, even if that meant dying young in a foreign war – had ended up driving the getaway car was a mystery to him. Alex seemed to believe that he’d been obeying a senior soldier and would be returning to duty when his superiors at the base had sorted things out. Then father gave son a copy of ...”

“... Los Angeles by the American Film Institute to improve the minds of Hollywood hotshots. He was in a class with David Lynch and Paul Schrader.Something in him was set on making movies, though years later he would also adapt the Kenji Mizoguchi film Sansho the Bailiff (1954) for the stage. In addition, and almost to demonstrate his caring and not caring, he wrote ...”

“... directors, who raised money and established their names outside the continent. During the Cold War, it was rare to find a cinema in Africa showing anything other than kung-fu movies or cast-offs from Hollywood and the Soviet bloc. The outstanding success stories of the analogue era were Nollywood’s ‘direct-to-video’ releases, dating from the early ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... can now be added Stella Ghervas, born in the 1970s in a region that was part of Romania before the war, occupied by the USSR in 1940 and re-annexed after the war, and is today the republic of Moldova. As a Soviet citizen, she was trained in philosophy and political science at the University of Leningrad, as it was, from ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... forties when he entered government service. It happened almost by accident, in the wake of the war, when the French state was busy reinventing itself. Kojève was short of money, and a friend wangled him a temporary job as an interpreter at the Directorate of Foreign Economic Relations. He soon made himself indispensable not only for his linguistic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”