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“... was the real capitalism, contributing to social inequality’ – but agriculture and class analysis are both wilfully absent here. Poiesis is a book about making things and selling them. Acton’s is a world in which production, commerce and retail were king; everyone participated in a market economy governed by rational invisible laws, with ...”

“... recites these lines, which he had learned by heart in grade school during the Second World War, as a way of enduring compulsory chapel at the small Ohio college where he had fled from a humbler establishment in his home town, Newark, New Jersey. As an atheistic Jew and disciple of Bertrand Russell, studying in what he had understood to be a secular ...”

“... who pick their way across a new land, and like the ‘gleaners’ Youn keeps on invoking: second-class citizens, followers, like Ruth behind Boaz, or the gleaners in Millet’s painting, surviving on what the prosperous discard. The gleaners and the sandpipers in turn resemble the caterpillars raised by the poet’s young son – growing, climbing and ...”

“... addressed to Brenan, it may at first seem to embrace those who live by their pen, but questions of class are never far away in Pritchett’s understanding of his own trajectory, suggesting that the pronoun mainly picks out those who have made their own way in the world without the leg-up which in one form or another the comfortable classes provide for their ...”

“... credit. At first sight there seems to be an overwhelming partiality for American work in the post-war period, but more critical reflection disposes of my insular prejudice. The transition from Europe, pre-1939, to the United States, post-1945, is truly astonishing. Nazi policies must take considerable responsibility for the Jewish influx and its vitalising of ...”

“... was 23. All right, that’s not so difficult. Twenty-five years before that the date was 1945: the war had just ended, and I was two years short of being born. Twenty-five years from now it will be 2020 and I’ll be 73 (maybe). Which is ridiculous – these are altogether different sorts of 25 years, surely? Why didn’t anyone tell us about time passing, the ...”

“... Fazzan in 1902, and now turned their energies on the Italians. Interrupted during the First World War, when Italian troops were needed elsewhere, this ‘pacification’ would continue until 1943, when the Allies finally pushed out the Italians and Germans after the battle of al-Alamein. In a brief section on the Italian period in A History of Modern Libya ...”

“... into reassurance with the assumption that others sin and suffer because differences in time, class, sex, race or nationality make them different (and inferior) in essence. In any case, we needn’t take fictional people too seriously because they are, after all, unreal. Their mishaps can confirm our own sense of safety. No writer is less willing to ...”

“... victims of the Aids scourge. One cannot but note how often in Africa Aids appears to feed on war and civil strife – in Uganda, Ethiopia, the Sudan, Mozambique and Angola the coincidence is plain enough. It is not merely that all diseases spread faster among a war-weakened populace: ...”

“... provide the most reliable figures for the losses suffered by the Soviet Union in the Second World War – twenty-six to twenty-seven million, of whom ten million fell in battle or died in captivity; while the number of victims of the 1929-1952 repressions was 22 million. The first figure is correct, In the second, however, he has apparently failed to include ...”

“... British and Irish Governments as the writing on the wall. They give every sign of preparing for war. The cargo of arms from Poland, destined for Loyalist terrorists, contained, among other materiel, two tons of high explosive. This time British intelligence intercepted the freight. But what about last time? Brian Nelson, a Loyalist terrorist and army double ...”

“... gave Asad the chance to go to school in Latakia, an experience which encouraged a good measure of class resentment and a desire to take part in political and social reform. After school his career was shaped by his attachment to the Air Force and the Ba’th Party. According to Mr Seale, Asad’s ‘commitment to conspiracy’, together with a capacity for ...”

“... explain his reactions when he is in office? Then we are told that he is an example of the middle-class individual who has been denied any opportunity to realise himself as an important or meaningful member of society. Therefore he flees forward, he is always conscious of crises ahead, he is anxious to create issues if they do not arise of their own ...”

“... et la pitié, Marcel Ophuls’s stunning documentary of life in Clermont-Ferrand during World War Two. Her attention was caught by a clip showing Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Final Solution and Himmler’s deputy, shaking hands in May 1942 with Darquier de Pellepoix, charged by the German occupiers and the Vichy government with delivering ...”

“... the Pall Mall Gazette, he’d been able (he said) to ‘wreck cabinets [and] let loose a tide of war upon helpless populations’. He was responsible – in his own words – for ‘ministers driven into retirement, laws repealed, great social reforms initiated, bills transformed, estimates remodelled, acts passed, generals nominated, governors ...”