“... involving children abused till they died. These were reported in the press, especially the middle-class Neue Frei Presse, in a tone suggesting that such horrors were previously unheard of. The reports were sometimes sentimentalised – this is what can happen when country girls come to the wicked city – but also sanitised for the bourgeoisie, represented as ...”

“... powers and the USSR started by producing and stockpiling nuclear weapons as a deterrent to general war. The idea seemed simple enough. Because of the enormous amount of destruction that could be wreaked by a single nuclear explosion, the idea was that both sides in what we still see as an East-West conflict would be deterred from taking any aggressive action ...”

“... have been calling for them to – the ICC would have the jurisdiction to prosecute Israeli war crimes committed in the conflict. But ICC membership may not be the panacea that some believe it to be. Even if the court overcame the obstacles to bringing a case, it still might not be able to deliver Israeli suspects to the dock. In the short term, the ...”

“... woman’ while the father, Edward Albert Aldington, ‘was nearly a gentleman ... of much greater class than this very common, fat woman that he married’. Mother seems to have been the dominant partner, and her novels, ‘though hideously vulgar and illiterate’, as Richard wrote to his brother, ‘have much more vitality’ than those of his ...”

“... more easily with the Bosnian Serbs because they talk the common language of the officer class. General Mladic is nothing if not professional in the execution of his programme. The ragtag Bosnian Government Army is made up of ex-civilians and a few former Yugoslav National Army officers; its organisation is chaotic because it was formed at the moment ...”

“... of the Modernist movement? It was initiated by Pound and Eliot about the time of the First World War, and in America it set off a further wave of innovation (often referred to as ‘post-Modernism’) after the Second. Beats, Black Mountain Poets, the New York school of the Fifties – all these and others, though clearly different, are unimaginable without ...”

“... evil, and – most important – a power of conveying youth and fashion which had the panache of class but none of its constraints and limitations. Jenny Pearl, the heroine of Carnival, had the same kind of fame as the post-war heroine of Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat, and Diana Cooper adopted her ...”

“... 1908 and 1911 he fell in love with the stolid, pragmatic instincts of the British governing class and the empire over which it ruled, despite the antisemitism which prevailed in both. In 1910 he changed his surname from Bernstein to Namier, and in 1913 became a British subject. But Oxford wasn’t willing to make him a don, so Namier launched himself ...”

“... Ralph sounds dry and affectless to begin with, but that’s just a symptom. He’s a Falklands War veteran who knows about traumatic stress disorder first-hand, having suppressed and later recovered his memories of escape from his burning ship. We first meet him when he attends his father’s funeral, and goes back to the old house ‘downstream of the ...”

“... spot.Koltzov’s sitting-room was well and expensively furnished like any sitting-room in a first-class hotel in peacetime. It was lit by table lamps and warm. It did not look or feel like any other place I had been in Spain. Koltzov was a small thin man, with thick, well-cut, grey hair. He wore a dark, excellent suit. He had the kind of face that makes an ...”

“... exact three blocs were emerging at some speed. This new three-bloc world, rather than the Cold War, was, I suggested, the new order for which they must plan. This led to heated objections: Oceania and East Asia made sense to most, but, it was pointed out, for Eurasia to exist, Western Europe would have to achieve full economic integration with the eastern ...”

“... the paper.’ Likewise, presumably in another fit, the author of The Origins of the Second World War let the cat out of the bag: ‘I wrote for relaxation when much taken up with College administration.’ This fit must have been insufficiently severe to make him set down on paper what he had once let slip in conversation, that the book had been written in ...”

“... Not that there’s a hint of that front of house, which is chaste, cheerful, middle-aged, middle-class and above all well-off, the car park full of four-wheel drives, Pioneers, Explorers, Conquerors, Marauders, all of which have blazed a fearless trail across rural Oxfordshire to this well-heeled location a mile or two from Chipping Norton where the best is ...”

“... father’s modest success as a lawyer had propelled the family out of poverty and into the middle class with its potent symbols: a car, a house in the suburbs, a television set, summer vacations at the seashore in Maine. These symbols were the same as those to which the Irish and the Italians and the Poles aspired: in one generation the fundamental shape of ...”

“... the Mughal emperor, the British went to great lengths to create an intricate taxonomy of caste, class and religion, a patchwork of conflicting interests which apparently could be held together only by the higher logic of imperialism. The British insisted almost hysterically on the hostility between Hindus and Muslims, and by the time decolonisation ...”