“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... de Poire to Diaghilev in Misia’s apartment, a friend burst in to say that Austria has declared war on Serbia. Gold and Fizdale tell a sombre version of the famous ambulance expedition to the Front, with Misia in command and Cocteau featuring as mascot. Frederick Brown’s account is more savage. Probably our authors are closer to the truth about this ...”

“... young Scottish sectarian thug: he is an impoverished, disaffected, prospectless victim of a wider class battle. The fissiparous nature of Ulster Protestant militias – ‘UDA, UVF, UFF, UR’, as Rebus reels them off – doesn’t stop the excluded hooligan’s yearning to find in them a galvanising identity. Having a side in a fight is what ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... whole novel right there.) In 1950, one pair of ladies’ white knickers (‘retrieved from the 3rd Class Compartment’) and a lot of handbags. On Christmas Eve 1955, a person left their false teeth on the 10.30 train to northern parts, but thankfully only ‘the upper set’. The 1960s got off to a good start with the loss of a ‘pair of dancing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Julian in Paris and at St John’s Wood art school in London. His portraits of the Lagos upper class – doctors, lawyers, engineers, chiefs and Indigenous rulers – as well as British colonial functionaries show a society keenly aware of the political value of this form of self-representation.One of his most striking works is Sisi Nurse (Charlotte Sisi ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... limited soil disturbance and therefore frowns on the mechanical destruction of weeds.In the US, class-action lawsuits have piled up. When Bayer acquired Monsanto, it settled more than 100,000 cases; some sixty thousand others remain unresolved. In 2019 a jury awarded $2.1 billion in compensation and damages (then reduced to $87 million) to an American ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”