“... in times of crisis – a prediction confirmed, for example, at the time of the First World War and again during the McCarthy era, when all the branches of government joined in sanctioning egregious violations of free speech. Indeed, in 1798, only a decade after ratification, Congress enacted the Sedition Act, outlawing public criticism of the federal ...”

“... hadn’t been drinking,’ added my aunt, a little too quickly. My father, who spent the war with the Sea Scouts spotting mines in the Mersey, involuntarily did his bit for the Third Reich by putting his foot through the hull of a canoe. The first I knew of the docks was the cranes you could see from Wallasey. You could look out across the river at ...”

“... era’ (which might have been better said of the splendid ocean liners of the day). In the highest class came the Bugatti Royale, a car for rajahs and emperors (though the last Habsburg emperor went into exile in a Gräf und Stift, the Austrian Rolls, the same model in which the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo). But the Bugatti that made the ...”

“... couldn’t stomach the triumph of a long-suppressed Bengali nationalism. Instead, they declared war on East Pakistan. A well-organised massacre of Bengali students and intellectuals followed, and many of my acquaintances and some close friends perished. The generals who organised these events and the politicians who supported them were unrepentant, blaming ...”

“... and Europe’s great expansion? Plagues are different from other catastrophes. Fire, flood and war destroy property as well as people. Famine makes people eat their seed corn and their animals. Plague does none of these things. If it halves the population then it doubles the amount of capital available per head. Or maybe more. In a rather Micawberish ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I would be wise not to name’. He went on to serve his country as an officer in World War Two. ‘Who I am in my majority,’ he concludes, ‘and what I do, and whether I am in the criminal trades or not, and where and how I live, must remain my secret because I have a certain renown.’ It doesn’t ring true. Would someone who had gone through ...”

“... eclipse of her most acute modishness, and the closing of her house, just before the Second World War. Given how contemporary her style still seems, and how recently she was on the scene in person, with her glittering little face, round hats and soft suits, it is hard to believe that she was already 20 years old in 1903, and in her fifties during 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”