“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sign. Much as the Augustans wanted remoralisation and tranquillity after the upheavals of civil war and restoration, so today we seem to desire a universally accepted morale-bestowing conformity. The arts acquiesce in this more than they seem to know. Indeed, such internal conformity often strikes one as virtually a product of its apparent ...”

“... the difficulties. It was quite simply lack of state subsidies – and when, since the Second World War, this was remedied, thereafter opera has taken its rightful place in British musical life. By restricting himself to ‘opera in English’ rather than ‘opera in England’, Mr White offers little in the way of explanation. It was in the first place the ...”

“... mirrors.’ Her delusion appears to have been occasioned by guilt that she had survived the war and its nature underlines the degree to which she identified with the dead young men she wrote about in her autobiography Testament of Youth, which covers the years from her birth in 1893 until her marriage in 1925, but is centrally concerned with her ...”

“... which run through Marc Selverstone’s study of Western policy in the formative years of the Cold War. One is the notion of the ‘Communist monolith’, a giant command structure through which the Soviet Union controlled the thoughts and actions of every Communist in the world. But the other is the reluctance of so many policymakers, in Britain and the ...”

“... Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.’ Kelly’s comments echoed the president’s remarks in the rally’s immediate aftermath. (‘Some very fine people on both ...”

“... in some versions, Blondi the dog); that Unity Mitford gave birth to Hitler’s child early in the war; that 2014 was going to be, like 1914, a year in which world war broke out; and so on. I suppose I should have been prepared for the questions put to me by REN-TV, a privately owned channel which after its founding in 1997 ...”