“... policemen, mailmen, shoe salesmen and streetcar conductors still recovering from the Second World War; and their wives, who make do, limited by the meagreness of their possible ambitions. Familiar worries run through her work: the troubles of drink, marriage, children, family and – involved in all of these – sentiment and sentimentality; the ease with ...”

“... with the suffragettes and ending with images of protests in London and Edinburgh against the Iraq War. Although the events depicted are familiar territory for an exhibition concerned with social history – the Great Depression, postwar immigration, Greenham Common, the miners’ strike – McQueen foregrounds the photographic image itself as a site of ...”

“... with which Beckett had some acquaintance in real life, when towards the end of the Second World War in Nazi-occupied France, he and his wife scrabbled about for a few carrots or onions along with the rest of the half-starved population. The tramps of Waiting for Godot (though who says they are tramps?) are similarly reduced to hoarding the odd ...”

“... North Caucasus, but almost none from Central Asia. This shouldn’t be a surprise. During the Cold War some Kremlinologists claimed that the region was more prone to dissent and rebellion because its Muslim population was inherently anti-communist. The US and other Western governments expanded their broadcasts to Central Asia during the Soviet occupation of ...”

“... of this book, he lays out his own Livingstonian anthropology. These wandering bands did not know war, as the inhabitants of the nuclear-free zone of Lewisham shall not know war. They were ‘a very together, well-organised and sophisticated proto-culture’. Everything that we are today has emerged from the hunter-gatherer ...”

“... after their lives were reduced to rubble by Hurricane Katrina.) None of them can be called working class, but the words immigrant, minority and ordinary are regularly applied by themselves and their party to prove that social background and gender have not hampered them in their climb (hard work and determination is all you need) to cabinet office, so what are ...”

“... history of the second half of the 18th century. David McCullough’s 1776: America and Britain at War is designed both to cash in on the cult of the founding era and to act as a mild corrective to its excesses and misrepresentations. To be fair to McCullough, the book’s subtitle sits somewhat uneasily with a thesis that emphasises internal divisions within ...”

“... however, who doesn’t really like to be seen thinking at all. It’s more chic (or more upper-class) just to drift from one thing (or one bloke) to another, and to represent one’s life as a sequence of anecdotes. Someone suggested she get a life settlement out of Sidney: ‘Feckless like my parents, I was not cut out for that sort of thing. The future ...”

“... presents himself as an outspoken advocate of two unlikely political causes: the Falklands War and its conduct (‘the direction in which the bows of an enemy warship happen to be pointing at the moment of encounter cannot justify letting it go’) and capital punishment, which he would ‘be quite happy to see extended to the perpetrators of any ...”

“... no longer feel at ease in each other’s company. The story of one family from al-Khudat, a middle-class Sunni neighbourhood in west Baghdad, explains why the city is going to remain divided. The victims in this case were Shia, but what happened to them, and how they reacted to it, is typical of refugee families elsewhere in Iraq. The family had lived in ...”

“... Plato thought the ideal state would have a population of just 5040: ‘numbers enough for war and peace, and for all contracts and dealings’. Aristotle believed large states to be ‘almost incapable of constitutional government’, and that large populations carried the risk of foreigners blending in and acquiring the rights of citizens. The ...”

“... America: the spectre of anti-Communism. In a word, Vietnam. Only three weeks into the bombing war in Afghanistan, the dreaded word ‘quagmire’ headed a New York Times piece by the Vietnam-era commentator R.W. Apple Jr, pointing out the ‘many echoes’ between the new conflict and the war America tries hard to ...”

“... words of regret will strike most readers as welcome and overdue. To unrepentant apologists of the war, by contrast, they have the feel of apostasy and betrayal. The question is: does Fukuyama tell us anything that we don’t already know? Can he explain how ‘the irresponsible exercise of American power’ became ‘one of the chief problems in contemporary ...”

“... century BCe, in which a blameless Helen goes not with Paris to Troy but to Egypt to wait out the war. Part of H.D.’s task in the poem is to integrate seemingly disparate plots and structures of desire, via a kind of psychoanalytic interrogation with Theseus, a Freud-figure.H.D.’s several novels also ring variations on names, as if curled within the name ...”

“... bomb was a launchpad to a brilliant life as an experimental physicist and counsellor to the Cold War state. Oppenheimer did little physics after Los Alamos. He wrote limpid essays on the nature of science, directed the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study and, after the withdrawal of his security clearance in 1954, emerged as a tragic hero of the American ...”