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“... To be an Algerian Jew was to be caught between the opposing sides of what would soon become a war of decolonisation.The Derrida family home was a sanctuary, but even there, he said, he felt like a ‘precious but so vulnerable intruder’, since he was born after the death of an older son, Paul, at three months. His mother, Georgette, whom he ...”

“... press) and he likened their activities to those of Nazi officials towards the end of the last war who pushed funds overseas in order both to provide for themselves and their fellows after the loss of a war which they dared not try to end, and to create a base for a revival of the party’s fortunes. Even more serious ...”

“... Sherman Hill, a desirable district of Des Moines, Iowa. Pillars, parquet flooring, leftish middle-class clutter. It’s a fantastic, warm evening. About sixty of us, a handful of journalists, but mostly Sherman Hill residents, have come to see Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator, New York Knicks professional basketball star and Rhodes scholar who ...”

“... the creation of Bloomsbury’s Georgian delights, to the development of Figs Mead, a model lower-class suburb, in the 1830s; and the Foundling Hospital estate, to the east of Bloomsbury, developed from the 1780s to the 1820s, which reached its social and architectural summit in Brunswick Square, so beloved of Isabella Knightley. By giving equal weight to the ...”

“... the source of so much in the stories and novels, is explored in detail. Expatriate, rentier, class-bound, sly, odd, sinking into genteel poverty, they provoked in Wilson, the youngest of his generation, an exasperated pity, and supplied him with many grotesque, comic and pathetic ideas and images. The gay world he was destined to inhabit provided equally ...”

“... traces the fitful emergence of the market from the late 18th century to the eve of the First World War, treating it not as an episode in economic history, but describing the historical and cultural context which can alone explain the tortuous process by which the very idea of a market in property was first established and then developed until it came to occupy ...”

“... in English from Cornell, and thought herself better than the small-minded Shillington middle class. She was a frustrated writer. ‘My mother,’ Updike wrote in a late poem, ‘knew non-publication’s shame.’ It was a shame that hardly troubled him after the age of 25, when his first mature attempt at a novel was turned down. (Called Home, it was ...”

“... that he had arrived. Born into what he described with forensic precision as the ‘lower upper-class’ in 1908, he was the elder son of a hunting, shooting, philistine father, whom he disliked, and a vague, highly-strung mother whom as a child he adored. The family could claim only to be ‘lower’ because its rapidly diminishing wealth was ...”

“... Society, in Burlington House on Piccadilly, is a bomb-proof room built at the height of the Cold War to protect the collections of the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné, more commonly known by his Latinised name, Linnaeus. Along with Linnaeus’s books and manuscripts, and his collections of insects and shells, the strongroom houses his herbarium of some ...”

“... historical trail through five more centuries, concluding with Elis’s service in the Second World War. Perhaps Raymond Williams identified himself with poor old Elis. It was an ambitious plan, but Williams was an unskilful storyteller. One tale (set in AD 490) begins: ‘When the teyrn feels the frost, he remembers the taeog.’ No doubt he does ... Hand me ...”

“... from the occupied territories – as South Africa did from Namibia after it failed to win the war in southern Angola – is open to doubt. Nor does Yitzhak Shamir seem inclined to take the sort of bold political initiatives which have left F.W. de Klerk’s supporters and opponents gasping for breath. Israelis generally hate to be compared to white South ...”

“... by intending to show how the ‘phoenix empire’ had survived the great smash of the American War of Independence. Even more practically, he found much to admire in the stabilising apparatus of patronage. Balliol had made him and he could always depend on the support of aristocratic admirers like Blanche Dugdale (A.J. Balfour’s niece) and Philip ...”

“... resettling there. Like Stravinsky and Rachmaninov, he had fetched up in Western Europe after the war, but in essentially different circumstances which crucially affected his view of post-Revolutionary Russia. Unlike them, he was not a dvoryanin (gentry or lesser nobility): his father was an 1860s liberal from merchant stock, a trained agronomist employed as ...”

“... should strive to be masters, not slaves: ‘Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency.’ A stronger type of human being would tear off the veil of hypocrisy, otherwise known as reason and moral virtue, do away with guilt, celebrate instinct, preach violence and follow the call of its fierce heart. Ilinca ...”

“... In Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War, Sir James Manson hires a mercenary called ‘Cat’ Shannon to stage a coup in the tiny West African state of Zangaro – Equatorial Guinea thinly disguised – and replace its tyrannical president with one who will, perhaps, be less tyrannical, and will definitely grant Sir James the highly profitable platinum-mining concession he wants ...”