“... IDF reservists signed an open letter explaining why they would no longer serve in the current war. David’s period of mandatory military service, which ended in 2020, coincided with the introduction of new technology: wiretaps were giving way to speech-to-text software and exhaustive databases from which operatives could extract social media logs, phone ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... second with tropical nature. Ford lost both. The decisive engagement with the Brazilian working class began in the new dining-hall in Fordlandia on 22 December 1930. The spark that ignited the riot seemed trivial. At first, common labourers had sat at one end of the dining-hall, foremen and craftsmen at the other, and each group had been served by ...”

“... and later gave lessons. Semyon, a tough but witty son of a soldier killed in the Second World War, had ambitions of becoming an opera singer, but became a mechanical engineer instead. The anxious, fragile little Igor was the object of his parents’ devotion. At night, they hovered over him, holding his mouth open with a tablespoon to make sure he ...”

“... incidentally, like the rest of us. (At Pomona College, Foster Wallace’s ‘Prose Fiction’ class consisted entirely of getting students to read mass-market bestsellers.) Why are there no great novelists any more, critics often wail, as they hark back to a golden age of exquisite sentences and profound moral depths. There are no great novelists any more ...”

“... to relations between and within societies, to international politics as well as to national class struggle. Wherever they crop up, hegemons and their ideologues will do what they can to identify hegemony with legitimate authority: a social contract among equals in which leaders govern by consent and their followers give that consent in grateful return ...”

“... many ‘minority’ students as to make the term meaningless: this year, the college’s entering class of a thousand or so breaks down as 25 per cent Asian, 17 per cent Hispanic, 10 per cent African American, 1 per cent Native American. Should not the foundation course reflect – or at least gesture towards – the diverse cultural origins and gender mix of ...”

“... It was the back of beyond: but the patterns of social life persisted. The Roman governing class wove a web of influence and patronage; and letter-writing was a main thread in it. (Later, at least, we find books of model letters for all social emergencies – how to congratulate an acquaintance on a large legacy, or commiserate with him on a small ...”