“... reveal not just significant moments in the lives of the characters – two gay white upper-middle-class men – but significant moments in the history of America and, in particular, of that segment of the American gay community to which Roger and Alistair belong: the A-list (for clarification, see Ethan Mordden below). The novel’s single sustained conflict ...”

“... put in one place. The people in them are ‘socially excluded’ by being placed in great single-class ghettos. Such places are lifeless, homogeneous, boring, the result of ‘top-down’ rather than ‘bottom-up’ planning. In fact, as anyone familiar with it will know, Elephant and Castle swirls with street life. The shopping centre, which hasn’t been ...”

“... studies. But it disappeared again in a murky market flooded by stolen instruments. After the war, they were even harder to trace than stolen art.Eventually Kennedy learns that a Gagliano sold by W.E. Hill and Sons to the Parisian dealer Ernest Maucotel in 1925 could be the one she is looking for: it seems likely to have been Maucotel who sold it to de ...”

“... in Germany, Klemperer was considered one of the lucky ones: as a decorated veteran of the Great War he was permitted to go on teaching. By the time he was forced to retire in April 1935 the first wave of Jewish academic emigrants had already flooded the world’s universities and Klemperer’s half-hearted efforts to find a job outside Germany soon ...”

“... Mrs Siddons, but more to the political ferment and cultural turbulence of the age itself, with its war of competing national images and ideologies in the aftermath of victorious foreign war, its personal rivalries, fluctuating prosperity and burgeoning inequality, all of which cartoonists and newspapermen could portray on a ...”

“... peace plan of 1987, are, and have been since their creation, in a state of near-anarchy or civil war. Why this huge discrepancy between Protestant North and Catholic South? It is a question which must confront even the most unreflective observer as she travels southwards from the United States. Those who have tried to answer it have generally done so in ...”

“... to flee to Moscow, that just by being there he indirectly achieved victories in the intelligence war beyond the KGB’s wildest dreams. Supporters of the second view, and I am one, argue that Philby was instrumental in paralysing Western intelligence operations against the Soviet Union for ten years, that he ruined the careers of some of the CIA’s finest ...”

“... Pinochet Ugarte’s defeat in Chile’s 1989 elections was enormous. In Latin America, Cold War pressures had combined with local authoritarianism to produce four decades of right-wing dictatorships. Pinochet’s was the most notorious and the last to give way. With his departure, the entire region, with the exception of Cuba and Haiti, came under ...”

“... achieve a religious concordat with Serbia in 1914, Pacelli helped pave the way for the First World War seems absurd. Any Catholic diplomat (Pacelli was then undersecretary of state in the Vatican) would have done the same and he could hardly be blamed for the secular frenzy which followed. But Cornwell has delved to much effect – his book surpasses all ...”

“... this. For him, as for, say, a group like the Tel Quel group in Paris, criticism is part of the class struggle, an attempt to overthrow the bourgeoisie and ‘the dominant culture’. He announces a battle to come: ‘If “Leavisism” still constitutes a “problem” for the dominant culture, how can it have ceased to disturb the vulnerable, minoritarian ...”

“... off with Robert Dole, the quintessential tough-guy white male candidate, the wounded veteran (= ‘war hero’ in current parlance), a man’s man of few words, the Convention would have been a total failure if it had unfolded as a celebration of manly virtues. That would only have satisfied the white males and anti-feminist white females who will vote for ...”

“... disease was evidence of a weakness of will. Johnson isn’t so callous.But he is a product of his class and his background. He is a man who rags children and throws people into swimming pools. During one of London’s recent heatwaves, he chided those who felt that travelling on public transport was intolerable in 40°C heat. It might be a little ...”

“... from one space of tragedy to the next as if it were a suite of rooms, a suite of traumas, from war to revolution, to famine and mass persecution, and on to new wars, new persecutions – the territory for this hybrid memory formed earlier than in other countries: spiralling, multiplying versions of what has happened to us over the last hundred ...”

“... from their dead father (in life, one of the first drivers to be fined for speeding). During World War Two, Vichyite psychics joined forces with a London medium and a Himalayan astral brotherhood to relay messages from Conan Doyle, who reported an afterlife spent attending birthday parties and family reunions. The spiritualist crusade, which embarrassed ...”

“... he spoke with an almost imperceptible ‘accent du Midi’ – to a standard-issue, lower-middle-class, left-of-centre, anti-clerical family. He was very successful as a young man, a golden boy to the ‘radical-socialist’ (which was neither radical nor socialist) establishment that ran France – not very successfully – in the last decades of the Third ...”