“... into the front plate of his flak jacket as he rocks to and fro in the cold – he discusses the war in the tones of a self-consciously patriotic veteran, laconic, fatalistic, deadpan.His ostensible message is an appeal to Volodymyr Zelensky to withdraw his troops from Bakhmut to prevent further bloodshed. The city, he claims, is almost surrounded. The ...”

“... tickets.’ But he had never penetrated the haute bourgeoisie. ‘His delineations of middle-class life have in consequence a harshness and meanness which do not belong to that life in reality.’ The Dedlocks and the Veneerings and Sir Mulberry Hawk are simply not like the people one meets. By the same token, Dickens’s pictures of our higher ...”

“... is that all that had been cleared up by about twelve years ago, not only well before the China war but well before there was any central government control over Yunnan. All that political work had to have been done first before the Burma Road could have been built at all. The point to get clear about the Chinese bandit situation is that it had been slowly ...”

“... invalided home. There, though still in uniform, he recruited for a civilian ministry, and when the war was over he married a girl called Bettine. This seedy curriculum vitae was now about to become even duller and dimmer. There seems to have been a little money about by 1919 (a legacy or two), so Cecil and Bettine went to Pau, where in those days you could ...”

“... father was young again, a soldier, or throwing back his head on slicked-back Derby Days before the war. I stared at all that fame and handsomeness and thought they were the same. Good looks were everything where I came from. They made you laugh. They made you have a tan. They made you speak with conviction. ‘Such a nice young man!’ my mother used to ...”

“... nobody thought it worthwhile recording anything about them. Only with the rise of the middle class, and the new suburban villas, of the 19th century does something like a recognisable modern garden appear in the record. The 19th-century horticulturalist John Claudius Loudon devotes much of his work to ‘fourth-rate’ gardens, by which he meant gardens ...”

“... picture more.) Some portrait photographs are memorable because the photographer has won a tug of war with the subject – Richard Avedon has described the process in his account of taking photographs of people picked out of the crowd in the American West. Unlike Avedon, McBean, who began his career as a mask-maker, didn’t look for cracks. His photographs ...”

“... that empire was shoddy, that the end of empire was botched, that British intelligence in the Cold War era was incompetent and that ‘the wan, humiliated, failing country of the 1950s and 1960s’ was ‘propped up … by the monarchy, the Beatles and James Bond’. You may not like the wall-to-wall assertion of decline, but Winder is proposing what he calls ...”

“... like himself to her own wonderful family. It’s here that she drags in another of Hollande’s class jokes: ‘In reality the president doesn’t like the poor. A man of the left, he refers to them in private as “les sans-dents”, very proud of his witticism.’ (It’s a joke about the word sans: les sans abri, people sleeping rough; les sans ...”

“... role in Bridge on the Fucking River Kwai the penny drops. Trapped in his own Japanese prisoner-of-war camp for ten years, he’s lied and cursed his way free. ‘I won’t be coming in on Monday’, he tells me confidentially. ‘I’m going to the fucking races.’ Of course he is. I may be there myself. Diality The shock of remembering, having forgotten for ...”

“... In South Africa, a highly capitalised economy, mainstream opposition to apartheid took the form of class struggle, not race war, and Kentridge is fascinated both by the failures of the Russian Revolution and the successes of revolutionary avant-gardism. A dazzling multi-channel video collaboration with Miller and Meyburgh ...”

“... Afew​ months after the end of the Second World War, Stephen Spender returned to Germany. His plan was to contact German intellectuals. This was not very fruitful: most were dead or in exile, and Ernst Jünger, whom he did meet, evaded his invitation to show unqualified guilt for the Nazi past. But then Spender was asked to reopen libraries in the British zone of occupation, having first purged them of their Nazi staff and Nazi literature ...”

“... he claimed, was uniquely tolerant in Europe, and he noted that when the Dual Monarchy entered the war the cabinet had a Hungarian minister president (István Tisza) and a Polish minister of finance (Leon Biliński). ‘How many Irish ministers are there in Britain?’ he asked. ‘And how many Finnish ministers in Russia?’ He insisted the Austro-Hungarian ...”

“... the screenplay for Spartacus; President Kennedy crossed the thinning picket lines of Catholic War Veterans to watch the film in a cinema in Washington DC. The blacklist, at least in principle, was broken. So Trumbo entered Hollywood legend as ‘The Man who Broke the Blacklist’. As Pauline Kael put it, he became ‘the leading exponent of the ...”

“... The incredible frequency of these strikes proves best of all the extent to which the social war has broken out all over England. No week passes, scarcely a day, indeed, in which there is not a strike in some direction, now against a reduction, then against a refusal to raise the rate of wages ... sometimes against new machinery, or for a hundred other reasons ...”