“... His sister hadn’t seen him for seven years. She had been trapped in Kiev during the war that followed the Russian Revolution. Eventually, in 1921, she managed to escape with her elderly mother and two small children and made her way to Vienna. When we entered his room Vaslav was sitting in an armchair; he did not get up to greet us ...”

“... written for. ‘Greatness isn’t impossible, but greatness without the sanction of the dominant class is impossible.’ Given the nature of the dominant class in Italy throughout Pavese’s life, this was not an encouraging prospect. It thus became harder and harder to enjoy aspiring and achieving, desire and ...”

“... and suffers from schizophrenia and night terrors. Both women have PTSD, a legacy of the Vietnam War. Rose and Little Dog are themselves a legacy of the war, since his maternal grandfather was an American soldier. Much of the book is taken up with describing the experiences of Little Dog’s family in Vietnam before his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... more from the police and the lawyers than most murders’. This is a book about morality and class, about the uses and abuses of literacy and about the tremendous dislocations in British society after the First World War, which extended far beyond those who had suffered the direct trauma of battle. Hilliard uses these ...”

“... rules were merely custom and practice, retained through the fragile consent of the old political class. At a full council meeting in September, he openly pressured the local authority over his business interests, despite being warned that it was a conflict of interest. The exchange happened in public view, in front of the entire council; the video’s on ...”

“... colonialism. The land expropriation and forced migration suffered by Kosovo Albanians in the inter-war years encouraged their collaboration with Fascist states which appeared to offer them a better deal. The end of World War Two ushered in twenty years of anti-Albanian repression at the hands of Tito’s Minister of the ...”

“... a think tank called National Security Action, which advocated a ‘foreign policy for the middle class’ whose focus would be ‘Russia, Russia, Russia and China, China, China’, that is, the abandonment of Bush’s war on terror and ramping up of Trump’s reindustrialisation and trade ...”

“... Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the middle-class unmarried motherhood plot: Lynne Reid ...”

“... what they have largely become. Detail is for instance death to the American tongue.’ Manner and class, bedevilling our screens with Evelyn Waugh revisions and soapy TV scrapings from the heritage catalogue (country houses, clothes that fit too well), is no part of Raworth’s remit. He’s all detail, all darting quickness. Drainpipe trousers, winklepickers ...”

“... white male rock critic. In mini hatchet jobs for the Village Voice, Robert Christgau declared war on ‘the enemy’. He situated Abba in the tradition of the advertising jingle and sniped that their ‘disinclination to sing like Negroes reassures the Europopuli’. The Anglo-American pop-rock canon had by then established templates for Great Artists ...”

“... landed what I imagine was a strongly contested organ scholarship at Magdalen. He was a working-class boy but there was no trace of it in his voice or indeed of any class at all, though the fact that his parents had kitted him out with three Christian names may indicate their ambitions for him. This was a time, with boys ...”

“... Du Bois and the novelist Pauline Hopkins, began documenting their own and others’ Revolutionary War pedigree. Jews also started to publish family histories, create archives and found organisations such as the 1934 Society of Americans of Jewish Descent. Two women, one Cherokee-Creek, the other Chippewa, founded the First Daughters of America in 1930. The ...”

“... belonging to one or the other. In Quicksand (1928), Helga Crane, the daughter of a white working-class mother and a West Indian father, must pass as Black to enter Harlem society. In Passing (1929), Clare Kendry, also the product of an interracial relationship, passes as white to marry well. What sets Larsen’s novels apart from other such narratives ...”

“... where everyone is pulled into a single political society.’ Forty of those years were spent at war, but today Angola is a model of fast-track 21st-century African development, with GDP growth rates comparable to India’s, at least until the recent fall in oil prices. The ruling Marxist party, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola ...”