“... between the two world wars and of the decline of Europe looks to the armistice of the inter-war years with a new scrutiny. Could saner accommodations have been found? Could the palpable lessons of Armageddon have been learnt in time? And if we now find ourselves, more or less convincingly, at the twilight of Modernism in sensibility, in experimental ...”

“... has been commissioned to research a six-part series (to be called Cavaliers) on the English Civil War. So he applies for his reader’s card and is confronted by the famously unanswerable question: ‘Why do you want to use the Library?’ A child of his age, Matheson replies as if to a moron: ‘Because there are doc-uments in there. Millions of ...”

“... though now in the English department, at a comprehensive school of the kind the local middle-class parents managed not to send their children to. Since everyone had to stay at school until 16, and it was not permitted to tell pupils they didn’t have a hope of getting decent grades at what was then CSE and they’d be better off going out and earning a ...”

“... to the escalating chain of massacres, which are believed to have cost 100,000 lives since the war between the Government and the Islamists began in 1992. On the night of this latest horror the state television was showing coverage of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. Both Governments seek to present themselves as stable, civilised and modern, not ...”

“... they condemned the book for being too bleak: the young people of the Netherlands, emerging from war, should be allowed to feel hopeful. But The Evenings was a success because it measures the gap between what we’re told to feel about our lives – e.g. that being young is fun – and what we actually experience. In 2002, the Dutch Society of Literature ...”

“... new American government insisted that Indians, most of whom had sided with the English during the War of Independence, had forfeited all claims to their land, which could be appropriated without compensation. But this was a recipe for continuous and expensive warfare. As one member of Congress noted, ‘it will cost much less to conciliate the good opinion of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... anecdote, but the behaviour is in character. Jones’s trench-hardened language belongs to another war and its way of coping with casualties, as does the peculiar choice of reading matter. In Parenthesis (1937) is Jones’s account in free verse and poetic prose of life with the Royal Welch Fusiliers between December 1915 and July 1916. It’s a classic of ...”

“... revealing its stuffing of earth, and bits of grass and flowers. ‘“Nature triumphant over war,”’ one of the new friends declares, ‘in a wireless voice: for it was the sort of thing that people were always writing about to the radio – the new variety of wildflower they had spotted on the bombsites, the new species of bird, all of that – it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”