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“... makes clear from the start that the girls belong to different parts of Karachi’s upper middle class. Extreme wealth buffers the Khans’ experience of everyday life. When it’s too hot, their private security guards smash blocks of ice with Kalashnikovs, so that the family can soak their feet in cold water. Maryam’s grandfather, the Khan ...”

“... Excellency and the people. Chris Oriko and his girlfriend Beatrice (a civil servant with a first-class honours degree from the University of London) talk the same kind of English as Ikem, with slangy puns and word-play. Ikem’s girlfriend, Elewa, talks pidgin: ‘I no shy but I no sabi book.’ Her graduate friends can talk this language when they ...”

“... and lively observer who can quote hunks of Byron to visiting British Army officers during World War Two.The paradoxes are many, not least that of the cultured brigand. Hoxha came from a Muslim family, studied law briefly at Montpellier University and lived several years in France and Belgium. Molotov is reported to have said of him: ‘He is very handsome ...”

“... colour and vitality. The history of France or our own country has been transformed since the war by the researches of social, economic and cultural historians; and even though the dividends of this work are perhaps now diminishing, and historians returning to more traditional questions, the look of French or British history will never be the same ...”

“... He observed the whole story of governments’ relations with the trade unions during the post-war period from the inside. During the most fateful of those years, the ones which saw ‘In Place of Strife’, the Industrial Relations Act of 1971, and the road to confrontation in 1974, he was the hardened senior adviser of Ministers and Prime Ministers. His ...”

“... occasional anti-semitism in his youth. When he spoke of his hopes of becoming a professor, a class-mate responded: ‘That career was cut off for you at birth.’ But Elias belonged to a group confident in its German culture: anti-semites, like ‘Polacks’, were looked down on. The affectionate family and reassuring world of cook, nanny and governess ...”

“... of these hard-pressed farmers were dying under British generals in other people’s wars: the Boer War in South Africa, the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China. And above and beyond all this, most ominous of doomsday signs in that apocalyptic year, there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in Sydney. In 1900, in short, death was swift and common in the ...”

“... of Wroclaw in the 1980s could still encounter Germans who had lived there before the Second World War. One of those who escaped the mass exodus of the German population in 1945 was a man named Schiller, who had married a Polish woman and blended into local society without much comment. He seemed happy enough when I met him; and his Polish neighbours appeared ...”

“... to be The next Prime Minister but three: The stocks were sold; the Press was squared; The Middle Class was quite prepared. But as it is . . . My language fails! Go out and govern New South Wales! He was the outstanding practitioner in a golden, occasionally leaden, age of light verse (Chesterton, Beerbohm, Wodehouse, Harry ...”

“... and colourful group assembled in Marseille: Charlie Fawcett, a professional wrestler from an upper-class Virginian family; Mary Jayne Gold, a young heiress with a thuggish lover nicknamed ‘Killer’; Marcel Chaminade, an oleaginous Catholic monarchist who acted as the ‘unofficial ambassador to Vichy’; Otto Albert Hirschmann, known as ‘Beamish’ for ...”

“... Harvey Oswald’s lengthy stay in the Soviet Union during some of the hottest years of the Cold War; the unlikely trajectory of one of the three bullets fired from the Texas School Book Depository, the ‘magic bullet’ which passed through the president’s neck and then through the body of the Texas governor, John Connally; and Oswald’s own murder ...”

“... draws its support primarily from the established Shia clergy, the merchants and the Shia middle class, but has lacked popular support ever since it was founded in and by Iran in 1982, early in the Iraq-Iran war. That it had acquired an unsavoury reputation for interrogating and torturing prisoners did not stop it becoming ...”

“... At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the American Communist Party was a pale shadow of what it had been two decades earlier. Thanks to the FBI, the McCarthy hearings in the Senate and the Un-American Activities Committee in the House of Representatives, blacklists, firings and generalised fear, the Party’s ranks had been radically thinned ...”

“... often bolsters its opposite, a ‘march of freedom’ that often liberates people to death, a ‘war on terror’ that is often terroristic, and a trumpeting of ‘moral values’ often at the cost of civil rights. What does all this have to do with humble kitsch? In part the blackmail that produces ‘our categorical agreement’ operates through its ...”

“... out that the book’s premise wrongly suggests that German brutality stemmed from a kind of lower-class illiteracy, from an absence of culture. Hanna learns the full horror of her involvement only when she learns to read, and begins to absorb the best of bourgeois literature: Keller, Fontane, Heine, Mörike, Kafka, Lenz etc. There is some truth to this ...”