“... relatively humble academic existence was, he acknowledges, largely a matter of luck. Early in the war, the British government realised that the key to the country’s survival would be its ability to secure supplies of food and raw materials, for much of which it would not be able to pay. The answer could only lie in assistance from the United States. Roll ...”

“... gives her the wrong colour nail polish (‘Damn Miss Rose!’). Meanwhile she is ignorant of the war and events around her: ‘started to read a book but too nervous,’ ‘looked at the papers but nothing in them.’ Orton’s Susan is a sweeter and lighter presence, whose reactions to the events of her life are more naive than narcissistic. ‘I think ...”

“... of topographical maps overpainted with emphatic information of other sorts. In one, Second World War bomb damage is recorded and in another Charles Booth details the wealth or poverty of households. Black indicates total destruction in the former and abject poverty in the latter; yellow indicates upper-class wealth and ...”

“... and the legendary jazz scene – Truman may have heard Charlie Parker live – was a middle-class affair found in labour union halls rather than bordellos. Two Irish gangs, the Goats and the Rabbits, fought for control of the city. Tom Pendergast, the cunning, sickly boss of the Goats, ran his operations out of a two-storey building on Main ...”

“... as almost anything but writing – baseball, boxing, game-fishing, lion-hunting, bullfighting or war. In a way, he was as ungenerous to himself as he was to most other writers, including some he certainly did learn from, like Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson. Yet very good writers, including Ford and Pound and Joyce, recognised ...”

“... on the ‘arts’ that would distinguish Rome, the ‘arts’ of imperial rule that lay in making war and peace, leaving to ‘others’ the creative arts of working in bronze and marble, and the intellectual arts of rhetoric and astronomy. No contemporary would have missed the implication that those ‘others’ were Greeks. The Romans had a good line in ...”

“... of Asia that Weber was to devote a large part of his reviving energies up to the end of the war. His intention was to show that other religions could not have produced the effects that a Puritanical Christianity had produced in Europe. But the drafts also betray Weber’s growing conviction that people’s religion is fundamental to their character and ...”

“... only of the Palestinian perpetrators. Palestinians who live in houses abandoned during the 1948 war have been evicted to make room for Jewish former owners and their descendants, but the reverse has yet to occur. Jerusalem was once the cultural, political and commercial capital for Palestinians, connected to Bethlehem in the south and Ramallah in the ...”

“... gangsters, fought with the Italian Arditi, kept a mistress in Sicily, reported the Greco-Turkish war from the wilds of Anatolia’ etc, etc. He did none of these things, but he developed the skills to describe them better than if he had. And yet perhaps the truth is not entirely mocked. Even before we know about Hemingway we can feel that the pleasure of ...”

“... just a handful of the Morris Boys, was considered precocious troublemaking, and duly expelled from class as stylistically, politically and just about every other way-ally unfit for consumption or discussion. Harper’s used to know how to write in English, the gnarly old teachers said; Willie Morris brought the American jazz that made the language howl and ...”

“... She even hinted at a Missing Will. I listened and pondered.’ Shortly before World War Two, Michael dropped the name ‘Nathan’ and adopted ‘Wharton’. His wife had borne him a son and he wanted to make a new start in life, to become ‘more responsible, soundly based and honest’, now that he was a father. ‘I wanted to escape once and ...”

“... womb and cunt expressed by the words because, bottom (in all senses bottom button, bottom of the class, bottom of the sea, bottom of his heart), woman, yes ... Ich bin der Fleisch der stets bejaht. I am the flesh that always affirms: Parrinder happily takes Joyce’s word for that sentiment. ‘The central subject of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake,’ he ...”

“... and the book comes into its own when Malinowski arrives in Australia, on the eve of the Great War, and begins the expeditions to Papua that effectively marked the beginning of modern anthropology. Malinowski revolutionised field methods. Asked once whether he had met any savages, J.G. Frazer was horrified: ‘But heaven forbid!’ His method was to ...”

“... she was heroic, as when she delivered medical supplies to soldiers during the First World War by toddling over enemy lines in an old Ford. And in World War Two, she was honoured by the French Resistance for transmitting information during the Occupation. ‘Gertrude Stein, safe, safe, is safe’, came the press ...”

“... research. In spring 1938 they briefly moved back to New Guinea, and returned to New York only when war threatened in 1939. Here they had a daughter, the child Mead had always longed for (her friend Dr Spock was her paediatrician). But the war separated them. Bateson served overseas with the OSS while Mead was drawn into ...”