“... as, say, To the Lighthouse, the transition from Victorianism to modernity. Given his period and class, Graves’s arrested development sounds standard enough, but it seems that it also reflected his strait-laced German mother’s high Protestant ideals. Martin Seymour-Smith, Graves’s first biographer and a close friend, traces the demonic bloodlust of the ...”

“... almost nothing is shown, and forty years of Americana flicker by like riffled pages. World War Two; the lure of Communism the emergence of Senator McCarthy; the Civil Rights movement; Vietnam; the return of Richard Nixon; Watergate – it is all there, introduced with a swift and studied casualness. ‘Meanwhile, the ...”

“... Something had to give, and since few people seriously believed in the possibility of another civil war (‘Spain is already too modern for that to happen,’ a Madrid banker once explained to me: ‘civil wars only occur in primitive countries’), the most likely outcome was either a coup by the Army following on the King’s inability to fill the power ...”

“... in a Sunni Muslim rural area of North Lebanon during the early Seventies, before the recent civil war. This beautifully written book describes the culture of masculinity in its multiple refractions through violence and narrative, joking and play, a world where status and power are organised vertically, where big landowners use the small landowners as their ...”

“... it is possible to do, freed from readership’. ‘I come from the thing called the “working class”,’ he says, ‘and I didn’t go to one of the older universities, and I’ve never lived in London. I’m a provincial … Which is everywhere but London, Oxford and Cambridge, and one or two rather well-to-do spots around that way. It doesn’t mean ...”

“... to come, or of the other ideological prisons created by the national security state and the Cold War. It already seems as if it was a long time ago that America, transitioning from industrial to consumer capitalism, lurched into the age of postmodernity. The brisk destruction of old ways and the foreclosing of possibilities have become such an accepted fact ...”

“... unsuccessful defence against an invasion by the forces of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, in the War of the Triple Alliance, which was fomented and encouraged by the British, who needed a new source of cotton because of the American Civil War and also wanted to get rid of Paraguay’s protectionist regime. My own ...”

“... loved. The School of Paris’s last surviving master was dismissed by some as a purveyor of high-class kitsch and hailed by others as one of the 20th century’s truly popular artists, but no one denied Chagall’s power as a colourist or the distinctiveness of his iconography: the embracing lovers, joyful barnyard creatures, tumbledown villages and Jewish ...”

“... has been brought into the mainstream of literary criticism, though it has mostly been chattering-class politics, short on information. The New Historicism substituted abstractions for scholarship and held a mirror not to Shakespeare’s time but to its own. Lake’s concentration on concrete politics is very different. Each play is related not merely to the ...”

“... we looked on dearth and famine as bad hands dealt by fate or divine judgment; we considered war to be in the nature of things; and we believed that personal happiness was a matter of fortune. Now, Harari says, these problems have all been reconfigured as managerial projects, subject to political will but not limited by the insufficiencies of our ...”

“... the decline of the Liberal Party, the dominant progressive political force until the First World War, which had slipped behind Labour in the 1922 election. The other big change was the postwar extension of the franchise, which nearly trebled the size of the electorate. Even taking these shifts into account, it remains staggering that a party founded in 1900 ...”

“... to everyone else in the complicated mesh of siblings, uncles and cousins that made up the ruling class, and titles were constantly changing due to inheritance, marriage and royal grants. Noblemen had children by multiple wives, not to mention mistresses, because death in childbirth was common. Richard’s second wife, Isabella of France, died at ...”

“... A few months alter the fall of Margaret Thatcher, the most original thinker of post-war Conservatism died. Perhaps partly because of the commotion caused by the change of national leadership, the passing of Michael Oakeshott did not attract much public notice. Even the Spectator, which might have been expected to mark the event with a full salute, ignored it for half a year, before carrying a curiously distracted piece by its editor, reporting strange losses in the philosopher’s papers, without so much as mentioning his political ideas ...”

“... of world wars. The nightmarish weaponry of a technological age was grotesquely foreshadowed in The War of the Worlds, which had been published two years earlier; in another story of the near future, When the Sleeper Wakes, he had invented the fighter pilot as hero. The Time Machine, with its visionary glimpses of a degenerate far future, contained graphic ...”

“... optimism of Victorian times had disappeared, and the Army’s dismal performances in the Boer War seemed to many to symbolise an incipient national breakdown. A popular pamphlet in 1905 proclaimed ‘The Decline and Fall of the British Empire’, and ideas for reversing the decline ranged from the purely environmental (such as Baden-Powell’s creation of ...”