“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Benghazi and heavy with men looking for work. I took a seat on the wooden benches of the first-class section. Over in the VIP lounge, the Chinese businessmen from my flight were relaxing over an ample supply of alcohol. But we had entertainment too, flickering across a small TV screen: a dramatic re-enactment of the capture and rescue of some Royal Irish ...”

“... culture of antiquity, however much its existence may have been predicated on the Roman imperial war machine, was fundamentally civilian in outlook and affect; the fifth century witnessed its catastrophic impoverishment and the triumph of a military world where martial success was the main currency. For the general reader, Attila is a byword for ...”