“... who declined to send official condolences on the news of his death because he was a ‘first-class cad’. Hemingway, yet more succinctly, described him as a ‘jerk’. Despite all this it can often seem that d’Annunzio was indeed ‘capable of everything’. Poet, novelist, dramatist, bibliomaniac, fashion guru, serial seducer, cocaine ...”

“... a study of love in the light of that remark, but also in the light of other facts of life, such as war and death. The events of the Great War and what followed it left Gerhardie with a hatred and contempt for war, and the people who made war, sentiments ...”

“... at Bryn Mawr, travelled to England at his invitation – not without difficulty, for the 1914 war was about to begin – only to find that he had no use for her, being otherwise engaged. He blamed her for the ensuing embarrassments: ‘her selfishness does not make me dislike her, tho’ it might make me hate her if I were made to suffer by it.’ So he ...”

“... grandfathers, one Irish, the other Turkish, were both imprisoned without trial during World War Two. Jim O’Neill was arrested in 1940, when Eamon de Valera’s Government, fearful that IRA activities might compromise Eire’s neutrality, rounded up all known IRA men. He was held for four years at the Curragh internment camp in County Kildare. Joseph ...”

“... colleges had been forced to shut down early in the wake of the Kent State massacre; anti-war protesters battled construction workers in the streets of New York; self-proclaimed political prisoners attempted bloody escapes; middle-class students planted bombs and robbed banks. In August that year, Richard Nixon took ...”

“... that stuck was Cristina Campo. Her parents, Guido Guerrini and Emilia Putti, descended from upper-class families. Campo’s paternal grandmother was a countess. Her mother’s family, the Putti, had been influential in Bologna for centuries. Vittorio Putti, Campo’s uncle, was a world-famous orthopaedic surgeon. Campo was born with a heart defect: the ...”

“... Thanks to his father’s service in the American Expeditionary Forces during the First World War, Said was an American citizen, and if he was reinventing himself, well, that’s what immigrants did in the New World. The Egyptian literary theorist Ihab Hassan had shed his Arab identity when he moved to the US, and had never looked back.But something in ...”

“... Bruno Ahrends, like so many German-Jewish emigrés, was interned at the start of the Second World War as an ‘enemy alien’ – stuck for the duration in Douglas on the Isle of Man. There he created dream images straight out of the unbuilt projects of Weimar Berlin, monumental glass and concrete skyscrapers of the kind that would be realised only after the ...”

“... wheat from the chaff. The basis of the story he has to tell lies in the two enormous changes the war brought to MI5 and MI6. The sheer necessity of national survival and the huge expansion of the services had the effect of bringing a whole new wave of highly talented intellectuals into the services, which, until then, had been the exclusive fief of ...”

“... shoulder, like the disgusting foxes that rested around my mother’s neck. The 1950s, just after a war had ended, the children of a new era, the children playing in the bombsites of something that has never been imaginable. The Blitz, the sirens, the rubble. Born two years later and only a few bombsites remaining. Thrilling for us, warnings about all sorts of ...”

“... Hague and Arusha (for Rwanda), are an attempt to show that achieving justice for the victims of war crimes, of crimes against humanity and of massive political persecution is not simply a matter of satisfying the grievances of individual victims. By stating that they will pursue the perpetrators of such acts to the ends of the earth, the Tribunals are ...”

“... haunted him since his childhood. As a boy, he tells us, he grew up believing that the Second World War was ‘a just and moral crusade’ ending in a victory over tyranny. The British had fought in the expectation that ‘with victory would come justice: those who had done evil would be punished, and those who had died would be avenged.’ But as a man he came ...”

“... written of the novels, Washington, DC, covers the years of the Depression, New Deal, Second World War and Korea; and the final volume, The Golden Age, takes the story to the millennium, though for most of its almost five hundred pages, oddly, it covers the years from 1940 to 1950, reworking and amplifying the historical material covered by Washington, DC. Of ...”

“... is just comic, especially at the start of the film. Bonaparte is shown at school during a class on ‘islands’ – amazing what destiny can do to a syllabus. Corsica is described as ‘half-civilised’, and Bonaparte stands up, outraged, controlling himself only with difficulty. Then the teacher says (or a title-card says for him): ‘Oh, I was ...”

“... Empson taught literature in Japan from 1931 to 1934, and in China from 1937 to 1939. After the war he returned to China for five years before settling into a life divided between Sheffield and London. In 1932 he fell in love with some eighth-century Buddhist statues in temples near Nara in Japan, ‘the only accessible Art I find myself able to care ...”