“... to the Celestial City. The world of Athens and Rome might have been more vivid to educated middle-class men, but those who had not been schooled in the classics invested biblical landscapes with the elegiac force of childhood experience. The Hellenist Matthew Arnold pointed out in his contemptuous analysis of Nonconformist Hebraism that the fervours of ...”

“... in a storm of directives, he is basically trying to keep his place in the continual churn of the war and the Final Solution: trying to run the camp as economically and frictionlessly as possible, trying to keep his wife, stay on top of his zealous underlings, chase after the impressive and intimidating manliness that was never at any time his. He is a ...”

“... of the phenomenon, Ronald Paulson characterised jestbooks as writing from below, as labouring-class culture defiantly thumbing its nose at polite taste. Inexpensive chapbooks of the kind produced by the Dicey family in the middle decades of the century, and distributed via a ramshackle network of itinerant peddlers and provincial booksellers, seem to ...”

“... schools that taught them. In ‘La Bataille des VII arts’ (c.1230), Henri d’Andeli depicts a war between the logicians of Paris and the grammarians of Orléans, the last bastion of classical and literary studies. The daughter of Madame Astronomy predicts the date of the battle, Arithmetic counts the troops, and Canon Law rides haughtily in the ...”

“... the Party workers. In the early 1950s Feltrinelli decided that he wanted to create a large working-class library and cultural centre, containing all the key texts of Marxist and trade-union history. Although there were already signs that he would have difficulty toeing the Party line, he arranged, with the agreement of Togliatti – the PCI tried to control ...”

“... Leonardo DiCaprio produced a Netflix documentary filmed in the DRC called Virunga: Conservation Is War. In South Africa’s national parks, ‘bite dogs’ were trained to pin suspects to the ground. One dog, Arrow, set a parachute-jump world record. Another, called Killer, intercepted 115 poachers and was awarded a Dickin medal for gallantry and bravery in ...”

“... parishes because of a spate of killings. There has been a popular backlash against a political class accused of corruption (huge increases in salaries for parliamentarians were recently proposed). Calls for reparations are made and contested, and the narratives of plantation tours are sometimes questioned. There is the prospect of the island breaking with ...”

“... like nobilis to Romans in 42 bc, was a signifier not only of good character but also of social class, and everyone knew the two often didn’t go together, however much they were supposed to. One of the things that Antony implies by calling Brutus ‘the noblest Roman’ is that he was the most committed to maintaining the values and privileges of his ...”

“... of 11 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a crowd in Washington about black suffrage. The Civil War had been over for a week. Lincoln had already walked the streets of Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, taking in the devastation at first hand. ‘The only people who showed themselves were negroes,’ the radical senator Charles Sumner noted. The ...”

“... shattering of the status quo, this blow for a kind of morbid equality with Israel’s formidable war machine, has exacted a huge price.The fighters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad – brigades of roughly 1500 commandos – killed more than a thousand civilians, including women, children and babies. It remains unclear why Hamas wasn’t satisfied after achieving ...”

“... He didn’t do well at school or at Sandhurst; nor did he distinguish himself during the war. Although he did the élite thing in volunteering for the Royal Flying Corps, he won no medals – a matter of some regret for a man who passionately believed in individual heroism. (One of the very few things Mosley says about his son in My Life is that he ...”

“... shimmer, partly because of all the glamour: Berlin, Rome, Paris, New York, where Bedford sat out war in Europe in the 1940s, and especially Sanary-sur-Mer, on the ‘unsmart side’ (by Bedford standards) of the Côte d’Azur, where she and her mother settled for some years among the émigré colonies of the 1920s and 1930s. She was taken in, kind of ...”

“... About half a million anxious people left Paris in September 1939 after the declaration of war. Then a workaday calm reclaimed the city, as French propaganda continued playing in the key of imminent victory: the government, headed by the right-leaning Radical Edouard Daladier, convinced most of France that the Allies would be more than a match for the Wehrmacht ...”

“... road, rather than following the siren songs emanating from Beijing and Moscow. The Vietnam War was at its height, and the architects of America’s Cold War could take comfort from their ability to contrast a prosperous, peaceful, capitalist Japan with the oppression and poverty of Asian nations under ...”

“... far-sighted: after all, the slavery they tolerated caused untold suffering, and ended in a civil war that claimed 600,000 lives. ‘While the Union survived the Civil War,’ he said, ‘the constitution did not. In its place arose a new, more promising basis for justice and equality.’ That new, more promising regime was ...”