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“... the ‘Marxist heresy’, the ‘infamous Clause Four’ (pointedly misquoted), ‘prejudiced class warriors’, ‘the over-mighty state’ and ‘troublemakers and extremist groups’. At times, the text almost takes on the character of a group therapy session, where a couple of reactionary old codgers who have had to sit tight-lipped through years of ...”

“... in Chicago, a collection of stories by Bette Howland, born in 1937, a Jewish writer from a working-class neighbourhood in Chicago. She married and divorced Howard Howland, a Wasp whose family came over on the Mayflower, leaving her a single mother to two boys; she was taken up by Saul Bellow, who became her mentor and sometime lover. Her first story came out ...”

“... time, however, its social composition differed. Alienated by the mensalão, much of the middle-class electorate that had rallied to Lula in 2002 deserted him, while the poor and the elderly voted for him in greater numbers than ever before. His campaign, too, struck a different note. Four years earlier, when its aim had been to reassure doubtful ...”

“... Ernaux was born. Annie was sent to a private Catholic school, where she was often top of the class. She went to train as a teacher in Rouen, abandoning her studies when she realised her heart wasn’t in it. She then spent six months as an au pair in Finchley, before heading to Bordeaux to work on a PhD on Marivaux. She had an abortion when she was a ...”

“... was knighted by Queen Victoria for his exploits and awarded the Iron Crown of Austria (second class), the orders of St Anne of Russia and of the Red Eagle of Prussia, as well as being a hereditary pasha of the Turkish Empire. These honours were added to those he’d already received, the Redeemer of Greece, the cross of the Légion d’honneur – he is ...”

“... among his three cardinal virtues, along with theft and betrayal. At a time when most middle-class gay writers were projecting their sexual orientation on fictional characters and endorsing the idea that homosexuality is an illness that calls for condolences, Genet was laying claim to his own homosexuality and was showing it to be a sin and a crime, a ...”

“... to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, in your home in the Sudan / You’re a poor benighted heathen but a first-class fighting man’) and in his early novel The Light that Failed produced a graphic account of the action Newbolt refers to, when a square was broken and a regiment all but destroyed. (Susan Chitty refers to Newbolt’s meeting at Clifton with ‘a survivor of ...”

“... The Criterion, T.S. Eliot’s periodical, ran from shortly after the First World War to the very eve of World War Two. Or, if one prefers, from one of Eliot’s major bouts of depression to another. The two time-schemes are, in fact, related. In 1921, the business negotiations to finance the proposed journal had to be suspended when Eliot suffered a nervous breakdown; it was during his convalescence from this illness that he wrote The Waste Land ...”

“... city of half a million people. Since then, with the influx of a steady stream of refugees from the war-torn interior, it has grown into a sprawling conurbation with an estimated population of five million. Town planning wasn’t on the government’s list of priorities during the war, and the city’s slums look more like ...”

“... style, let alone movement – existing between, say, the 1870s and the end of the Second World War, the trend would be a gradual ascent with some stunning vertical spurts before and after the First World War. In his new book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, the inordinately prolific and widely admired Peter Gay has much ...”

“... when a Conservative government was cutting the Navy Estimates so far back that the Falklands War was very nearly lost before it had begun? The truth is, I suspect, that party politics has always been a contest in which own goals count for more than well-directed strikes from the opposing side. Asquith may, in his prime, have been ‘the greatest ...”

“... the reader’s comment pointed out, ‘there was plenty of jumping in and out of bed.’ But then war broke out, and I took it away from the agent because he was having no success in placing it. I told myself that this was because of the wartime paper shortage. Everyone knew that it was impossible to get books published in a ...”

“... implications of a particular way of imagining politics and human life. In the context of the Cold War – and The Origins was pre-eminently a Cold War text – this view had the attraction of assigning responsibility for the evidently disastrous state of international relations firmly to the other side, whose beliefs were ...”

“... novel as an account of the dreary adulteries of ‘good people’ in the decade before the Great War, as a peculiar blend of bovarysme, sexual ignorance, faked illness and disastrous bouts of lust; or you can read it as a sort of allegory of the social and spiritual disorder that eventually caused the war (hence the ...”

“... Profumo lied like a trooper. Martin Redmayne, who was without doubt the worst Chief Whip since the war, failed to see through his mendacity, though his job was to know the strengths and weaknesses of his flock. I am surprised that someone as clever and worldly as Iain Macleod should have believed Profumo, but I doubt that Deedes contributed much more than a ...”