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“... the Galician-born last Republican prime minister, who resigned a month before Franco declared war; he had opposed, Allende-like, the distribution of arms to the people. Calling out the titles in lewd or gloating fashion, young soldiers supervised by Ricardo Samos, an ambitious local lawyer, cast books into the flames as if in preparation for Spain’s ...”

“... power in the first half of the century, the growth of the national security state during World War Two and the Cold War, and, most important, the ability of radio and then television to project the president’s voice and image into nearly every home in the country. By the 1970s, observers like Arthur Schlesinger Jr ...”

“... 1974-75; he went back to university at the age of 30. While the country was being mauled by civil war, Couto was studying biology. He went on to publish his first collection of short stories, Vozes Anoitecidas (Voices Made Night), in 1986 and his first novel, Terra Sonâmbula (‘Sleepwalking Land’), in 1992, the year a peace agreement with Renamo ended the ...”

“... of annihilation. Carey plucks a sentence from a letter written in 1915 to Ottoline Morrell. The war had ravaged Lawrence. Before it began he had felt that English life was on the edge of a resurrection. The slaughter in France undermined his foundations. Lawrence was given, like Céline, to overstatement: ‘It would be nice if the Lord sent another flood ...”

“... in spite of their topical surfaces. His singular theme has been the miserable solitude of middle-class white Frenchmen, men of ‘absolute normality’. The typical Houellebecq hero is a bored, alienated, self-pitying man who is losing his place in society, at work and, worst of all, in the bedroom. In a ruthless, zero-sum sexual marketplace, he loses out to ...”

“... system that disappeared at some point in the past, perhaps around the end of the Second World War. Racists exist today, but only at the margins of society: the thugs, the malicious, the ignorant – or, as is sometimes heavily implied, the lower classes. It is, they may add, unhelpful to condemn people’s ‘legitimate concerns’ over immigration at a ...”

“... could be a tactical ally against American imperialism. They failed to see that he wanted to wage war at home: his furious inauguration speech with its talk of ‘American carnage’ was a declaration of war on urban racial liberalism, especially as represented by New York, the city that had rejected him.Trump’s outlook ...”

“... tradition; and the understanding that the economic power of the United States after the Great War made possible achievements that at least in part depended on its independence, belatedly proclaimed, of the European past. This last point, on which Douglas strongly insists, may provoke some opposition. For example, she says more than once that Hemingway ...”

“... Life as a prisoner of war is an indeterminate sentence, and for that reason nothing you say about it afterwards can ever be quite true. In its more mitigated forms, with Geneva conventions, Red Cross parcels, letters from home and all that, no doubt a sense of the normal order of things can be maintained. But in some forsaken gulag, outside all the rules, with all information filtered through the enemy, you enter a new dimension whose nature is hardly communicable in words ...”

“... was not much of a family man, but here the evidence is more equivocal. At the beginning of the war he sent his first wife back to South Africa with their two young children, but when he was demobbed in 1948 neglected to bring them back to England, or even to make sure they were looked after. On the other hand, relationships were rebuilt when his children ...”

“... During​ the Second World War and the decades that followed, historians of modern Germany focused on one question: how did Nazism, with its negation of freedom and democracy, its aggressive commitment to war and conquest, its creation of a totalitarian state, and its visceral and genocidal antisemitism, take hold in Germany but not elsewhere in Europe? They sought an answer by delving deep into German history, as far back as Martin Luther, or even to the tribes analysed in Tacitus’ ethnography Germania ...”

“... and French propagandist during the period of Prussian rule which followed the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, a time when most Alsatians were largely indifferent to Kulturpolitik. Ungerer’s work most resembles Hansi’s in his illustrations to Das grosse Liederbuch (1975), a collection of German folksongs and nursery rhymes. Hansi was a super-patriot ...”

“... aspirant mother. Of course, those sensitive and ambitious women are usually the mothers of lower-class males; and in Wharton’s case, as in that of other 19th-century women writers, identifying with a father might have been more to the point. But while she speaks more fondly of her father than of her ‘beautifully dressed mother’, the most she can manage ...”

“... composition of the protests in Donetsk. The pro-Maidan protests, when they took place, were middle class and nationalistic; anti-Maidan was lower class and anti-oligarchic (and Russian nationalist). ‘I would see the people at Maidan and think: “What nice people, so well dressed, so educated.” Then they would open their ...”

“... were employed in the mines. Then, the coalfields had been the scene of this country’s only epic class-confrontation – the General Strike of 1926, a seven-month Calvary for the miners, a nine-day wonder elsewhere. It was also from the coalfields that the first Hunger Marches had set off. Finally, the frequency and magnitude of pit disasters made the perils ...”