“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”