“... debtors. But these top tax rates are no lower than they were immediately before the Second World War, which is very much higher than they were immediately before the First; and the level of welfare benefits is still higher in real terms than it was in the Thirties, when exactly the same arguments were conducted between Left and Right over whether they were ...”

“... sum on the pools, and this enables him to give his family every luxury that a conventional middle-class imagination can conceive. They take to their wealth as to an oddly onerous duty; frequent use of the Harrods account seems like an obligation. Rachel is welcomed to their home, and it comes to be felt that Rachel’s advanced worldliness will be useful to ...”

“... his element, which is probably why he spends so much time on it. He does not claim to be a world-class sailor, though he is obviously a competent one. One good reason for sailing is that, being a writer, he likes to write about having sailed. Sailing is guaranteed to provide alarms and achievements for his pen to celebrate. In this book he regretfully parts ...”

“... is the sense of the expression intended by Frederic Manning (Private 19022) when he called his war memoir of 1930 Her Privates We. As in the case of Marvell’s dead lover, the two strains of sense in the word conflict: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are both private and deprived. Spacks’s main interest is in the 18th century, and its reading habits as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sex and gender, and this difference in outlook reflected profound divisions between them in social class as well as in – for lack of a better word – sexuality itself. The mostly working-class sailors and their junior officers had yet to feel the effects of a historical process of ‘heterosexualisation’ that had ...”

“... Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970, three years after his humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War, the ‘naksah’ or setback that led to Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Sinai. Nasrallah was killed under a fusillade of eighty bombs dropped by the Israeli air force on his headquarters in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on the South, first published in three volumes and then, in abridged form, on the eve of the Civil War, in a single volume called The Cotton Kingdom (1861), were widely praised on both sides of the Atlantic. His Hartford friend Harriet Beecher Stowe commended them as ‘written in a style so lively and with so much dramatic incident as to hold the attention ...”

“... bum on my knee and you with your hands between the driver’s legs.’ Just before the Ukraine war began, I was sitting with friends in the Berlin restaurant Borchardt when the former SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder – red-faced, glutinous eyes, an ecstatic rictus – trundled through the room, glad-handing his shrinking circle of comrades: pure ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”