“... Stalin’s anti-semitic campaign (‘rootless cosmopolitans’) after the end of the Second World War. At the very end of his life, Stalin turned his mind once again to the ever-irritating Jewish Question. He planned to unmask yet another great conspiracy engineered, of course, by ‘Joint’, the sinister Jewish organisation which masterminded foreign ...”

“... two decades Japan piled up annual growth rates of 10 per cent and more and produced world-class steel, electronics and cars, financed entirely by domestic savings, without a penny of foreign capital – thereby flatly contradicting the current IMF dogma that global financial markets are the key to rapid growth. Forced to rely on energy imports, Japan ...”

“... socialist society ... was essentially built’ in which ‘the alliance of the working class and the peasantry was placed on a solid socio-economic footing,’ ‘ethnic conflicts became a thing of the past’ and ‘Marxist-Leninist ideology became dominant in the minds of the Soviet people.’ ‘History,’ the document said, ‘has not known ...”

“... of Sarah Worth. Here she is warning her daughter, who has just gone to Oxford, about the upper-class English: ‘People (which I see only in the dentist’s office, but must say I do devour eagerly there) and the National Enquirer (which Irving my yoga instructor is devoted to for its spiritual dimensions, its ESP and UFO news) are so full of the young ...”

“... is a wanderer and an obsessive: it’s this which sets up the resonance between the upper-middle-class Englishman and the Patagonians, Australians and nomads whose company he keeps. If he wasn’t the narrator of his books he could easily be one of the people the narrator meets. Consider the way he began his travels: When I was in my twenties ... I had a ...”

“... and Tans, it was possible to feel heroic. But it must have been hard to feel heroic in the Civil War and the years that followed its crimes. Yet O’Faolain’s early stories want you to feel that life in Ireland was a romance, and sometimes an epic. I have never been convinced. I’m an agnostic in these sentiments. I don’t believe that O’Faolain’s ...”

“... can turn to sections on deathbeds, suicide, mourning, burials, tombs and epitaphs, the after-life, war and disease, tragedies of love and – almost too harrowing to contemplate – the deaths of children. Unlike the contemporary historians of the macabre, who seem to have a blind spot here, Mr Enright has also included a section on animals, sadly revealing ...”

“... and his destructive philosophy – ‘the Labour movement’s nearest equivalent of a First World War general’ he had presciently called him in 1983 – made him refuse to even visit a picket line until the strike was almost over. Another setback was the failure to do the spadework necessary to ensure enough votes at the 1984 Annual Conference for his ...”

“... as ‘Songhay’: the word means ‘nobles’ or ‘royalty’, and refers to the ruling class of the empire of Gao, Songhay’s precursor. The Great Mosque at Djenné The Songhay empire, now forgotten by many Africans and largely unknown to Europeans, left a linguistic mark in the Niger basin. A dozen languages and dialects, spoken by roughly ...”

“... Trickett argued that the Greens’ success reflects a squeeze on Labour’s vote from the middle class (93,000 voters registered a Green first preference in London before backing Khan). But the story is more complex: Green wins in Tynedale, Alnwick, Stockport and Derbyshire suggest they are vying for the third-party role in English politics more ...”

“... not discuss the most obvious way in which British society seems congested: the incredibly narrow class of people from whom we choose our leaders. Again, Russia looks very different. If you went back twenty years and tried to guess who would be running Russia today and dividing up its spoils you would have to be clairvoyant: Putin was then a functionary in ...”

“... 1968 on a pledge of restoring ‘law and order’, targeted, with the backing of the FBI, the anti-war movement, the Black Panthers and other leftist organisations. The FBI declared the Panthers the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States, infiltrated local chapters with undercover agents, informers and provocateurs, and used brute force ...”

“... returned to their lost homes after death. Each era had its own distinctive ghosts. After the Civil War, the Demon Drummer of Tedworth excited the interest of everyone from the era’s chief ghost-hunter, Joseph Glanvill, to Christopher Wren and Charles II. A Hampshire landowner called John Mompesson imprisoned William Drury, a busker and vagrant, and ...”

“... believe my eyes. At about the time that I was learning to be truthful in my high-school writing class, Betty Mahmoody, who, like my mother, is an American woman from Michigan married to an Iranian man, wrote her memoir, Not without My Daughter (1987). In 1984, one of the worst years of the Iran-Iraq war, Mahmoody left her ...”

“... weapons have been hard to come by. Instead, their very power has constrained their use. War has always been destructive for the losers. It’s sometimes destructive for the victors too: the Soviet Union lost 13 per cent of its population in the Second World War. But until the invention of nuclear weapons, victory ...”