“... had been getting poorer ever since markets for their produce began to decline after World War One. Rumours of new opportunities and a temperate climate, later reinforced by the draw of the movies, had been attracting South-Western migrants to California since the second decade of the century. More arrived there between 1910 and 1930 than during the ...”

“... After his death in 1947 he was forgotten for decades, being useless to either side in the Cold War – all probity and no PR. Susan Weissman is even more discreet on personal matters than her subject was. Like most modern Serge commentators, she views him primarily as a misunderstood political figure, and suggests that to look deeper into such a private ...”

“... Lipno, Poland, as Barbara Apolonia Chalupec, the third and only surviving child of an upper-middle-class Polish woman who had married a part-Romany Slovakian tinsmith. Her father drifted into seditious activity against the tsarist occupiers; and when Pola was six years old he was arrested and, in time, exiled to Siberia. When he was released more than ten ...”

“... wanted mandatory religious studies, which the French vehemently opposed, and so an ethics class was decided on as a compromise. Pupils would study most subjects in their own language, but would learn geography and history in a foreign language and from a foreign point of view. Just 12 years after the end of the Second World ...”

“... face its own problems squarely, becomes the villain of the piece. Well before the First World War, on Hunt’s analysis, the British city is in free fall. Its subsequent frailty, a preoccupation throughout Building Jerusalem, he attributes less to the fall-out from the 1930s Depression or to postwar planning follies than to a loss of nerve palpable by the ...”

“... Meanwhile, their travel costs are calculated according to a formula based on the Business Class airfare for the number of kilometres from the Parliament to their constituencies. But to claim the allowance, they have to show a boarding pass. Understandably, therefore, many MEPs have become experts on cheap flight deals. For example, a British MEP could ...”

“... sociological views of human beings. The money is used to play the ‘ultimatum game’. A large class divides itself into pairs, who must not be friends or acquaintances. Each pair collects ten 5p coins. One of the pair proposes a division of the coins, and the other either accepts or rejects the proposal. The game is then over: no negotiation is ...”

“... life worsens, poverty is spreading, education and health services are deteriorating, the middle class is shrinking, and we are ruled by a junta whose money and power have increased to an extent people refuse to believe, even when they are confronted with the figures. A 45-year-old colonel who retires from the army gets a lump sum of close to two million ...”

“... friends, and gives him the fourth feather herself. Written in the aftermath of the Boer War, the book aimed to challenge the uncritical army worship and shrill imperialism of the 1890s. An Oxford graduate in his mid-thirties, Mason was a playwright, former actor and soon-to-be Liberal MP. In 1910, his fascination with psychology and analytical ...”

“... to pack my things several times, but in the end we left with our hands almost empty.Before the war, I was a writer. Today, on the ninth day, I feel unable to string two words together. It’s hard to believe that just over a week ago we were living a normal life. I have to try very hard to remember what that life was like.Those who survive will be able to ...”

“... Kapuściński, Mailer and Naipaul. Congo is endlessly fertile literary terrain. Seven years of war there – in a country the size of Western Europe with a population of almost seventy million – occupied fewer column inches in the Western press than seven weeks of war in the Gaza Strip, yet nowhere in Africa has ...”

“... Scepticism about the work of the humanitarian international goes back to the Nigerian civil war, a forerunner of the live disasters of the satellite television age. Encouraged by the Biafrans’ exaggerated claims of genocide and starvation, the relief agencies mounted an extraordinary operation comparable to the Berlin airlift. Critics like de Waal ...”

“... is especially well versed in the debates surrounding the causes and character of the English Civil War – for so long one of the consuming preoccupations of both professional historiography and national self-definition. What’s more, his research has been assiduous not just in the sources (many of them unpublished) bearing directly on Hill’s life, but also ...”

“... in Victorian architecture, as evidenced by the baroque North London cemetery, full of middle-class tombs like Pharaonic vaults, in which both Flora Milk and the contemporary narrator find inspiration. The principal historical puzzle in the novel concerns not the Pharaohs but the nature and appeal of Victorian Spiritualism, a craze which spread throughout ...”

“... a blood relation, so it seemed, to almost everyone in the upper – that is, the newsworthy – class. Whoever we were hunting down with a telephone, a Who’s Who and an envelope of press cuttings would turn out to be a ‘cousin’: if not a relative, a schoolfellow; if not a schoolfellow, a neighbour; if not someone who lived near his family in the ...”