“... in English by men born in Warsaw and Vienna. Czerniawski and Lind came here in the first post-war decade, and are – to me oddly and blithely – unconcerned about questions of entry, residence and nationality. (Lind marries an English girl who seems hotter than he is on the matter of aliens gaining work permits; Czerniawski drily describes the efforts ...”

“... recognised masterpieces, and a number of the essays, particularly those about the Spanish-American War, retain their power today. Norris’s life, on the other hand, was distinguished only by its privilege. He was the child of a prominent San Francisco family, whose every holiday was reported in the society pages. He attended a series of elite schools, and ...”

“... Neubauer’s comment on their results: ‘In a country which ... after the end of the Second World War bases its moral self-understanding upon the myth of the Resistance, completely different myths suddenly spring up and transform what is “real”. This result alone is worth the cost of the research.’ How so? It is not news that for a long time the French ...”

“... and best organised Islamist party is the Jamaat-Islami. It has joined in the protests against the war to avoid being outflanked by the radicals, but there are clear signs that its leaders are worried about climbing on the Taliban tiger. They may be rigidly puritanical in their ideology, but they are the kind of rigid puritans who in British and American ...”

“... days, in America especially, it is often seen as somehow derogatory, having a whiff of ‘third class’ about it and therefore best avoided for fear of upsetting visitors from less fortunate nations. Those who pioneered the expression, such as Frantz Fanon, would no doubt have become even more attached to the principle of violence if they had known how ...”

“... Mumbai. For some months polls in the US have shown that the economic crisis has replaced the Iraqi war in the minds of American voters. In any case, Bush has declared so many spurious milestones to have been passed in Iraq over the years that when a real turning point is reached people are naturally sceptical about its significance. The White House is anyway ...”

“... years of ‘law and order’ indistinguishable from moral and political disorder; four years of war against the media, ‘globalists’, ‘elites’ and other ‘enemies of the people’, which is to say his people, or rather his loyalists; four years of contempt for the vulnerable, whether Muslims, undocumented immigrants, Black victims of police ...”

“... The war​ in Ukraine has prompted a wave of self-critical reassessment among Western scholars of the former Soviet Union. Have studies of the USSR unthinkingly reproduced the logic of a Russian imperial project? Do we need to look at the Soviet period through the lens of ‘decolonisation’? The German historian Karl Schlögel’s own process of introspection began in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s stoking of rebellion in Donbas, which he describes in the preface to The Soviet Century as the ‘drop that made my cup run over ...”

“... 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 ...”