“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... thinking, as experienced by the educated postwar daughters of the West of Scotland working class – liberated, professional, rewarded, beyond anything their parents might have imagined, for better or for worse. Janice had, apparently, a ‘Bad Start’ as a baby. Her mother claimed this was because the sister in the maternity home persuaded her to try ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Politicians and journalists have blamed various things for the rise in knife crime, from ‘middle-class cocaine users’ – they fuel the drug trade – to UK drill, a style of rap music. Far-right agitators have linked the violence to race and immigration, while Beyond the Blade, a research project carried out by the Guardian, found that in 2017 nearly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Madame Chiang was an unexpected presence at the Cairo Conference in November 1943, the only World War Two summit at which China was represented. Sitting at the conference table in a black satin dress with a chrysanthemum pattern and split skirt, black tulle bows in her hair and shoes decorated with big brass nails, she made a considerable impact ...”

“... Charles Sorley must have been the most brilliant of all the young poets who died in the First World War. Yet ‘brilliant’, with its flashy, brittle connotations, isn’t the right word. He was undeniably clever, and forthright, but also good-humoured and modest, often very funny, shrewd and serious, but never (the young man’s vice) priggish ...”

“... the Communists, now with the Lovestoneites, now with the Trotskyists, now with the group of middle-class liberals he had known at college who were trying to build a Farmer-Labour party of their own. In anybody else, such behaviour would have been politically suspect: the man would have been damned as a careerist, on the one hand, or a dilettante on the ...”

“... Pierre Mendès France (‘PMF’) the passionate enthusiasm his name generated. For a whole post-war French generation he was the de Gaulle of the Left: a man of total integrity, a beacon of intelligence and republican principle in the darkest hours. Yet he was prime minister for just 245 days. George Holoch’s fine translation of Jean Lacouture’s ...”

“... of his life that held the attention – the text of the man, not of his art. As the writer and war correspondent William Walton said to Denis Brian, ‘a man who has spent all his life inventing fiction keeps on inventing it in his private life.’ The reaction started with the publication of Death in the Afternoon in 1932, the hero of which, as Kenneth ...”