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“... silks and spices, currants, dyes and soft leather among the British elite, the rising mercantile class and (we are told) even ‘humble peasants, labourers and servants’. Mather’s discussion is organised around two themes: the roles of three major trading centres – Aleppo, Constantinople and Alexandria – and the careers of a series of individuals who ...”

“... the idea of travel. Perhaps – and for the Nicolsons there are few greater sins – it is middle class, like saying ‘weekend’ or getting a knighthood. She went twice to Persia because her husband was on a posting there, and while there was never any suggestion that she would exchange her glittering English existence to keep house at the legation, she ...”

“... who says things like ‘J’habite Metroland’ in his orals is riding lawlessly in first class when he becomes the captive audience of an ‘old sod . . . dead bourgeois’ who gives him a rundown of the distinguished history of the line. One of its finest achievements, the boy learns, was to lay on two Pullman coaches (Mayflower and Galatea) for its ...”

“... in Malay, which he had brought back from years spent in a Japanese concentration camp during World War Two? Not to mention the bishop, described in the Congo Journal as ‘a wonderfully handsome old man with an 18th-century manner – or perhaps the manner of an Edwardian “boulevardier”’? What if this ‘pilgrim of the dry season’ – the sarcastic ...”

“... Spud and Sick Boy, thrawn and desperate sons of the disintegrating Scottish industrial working class, became such poster boys – literally – for the bright new Scotland of the early 2000s, with its craft beers and its blond-wood, obscenely overbudget parliament building. ‘Buying a Trainspotting postcode in 1996 was a solid investment,’ I read the ...”

“... moment at which the demand for mixed colleges occurred. This was the era of civil rights, anti-war protest and women’s liberation, causes which convulsed campus life across the Western world. The demand for coeducation can be read as one more sign of the egalitarian and febrile mood of the times. Although cultural revolution provides a noisy backdrop, it ...”

“... God and Ulster’ (and many of whom diversified into gangsterism) are threatening to go back ‘to war’. Others are more pragmatic. Manufacturing NI, a campaign organisation that promotes businesses in Northern Ireland, carried out a poll after the protocol had been in operation for a month. It found that while there had inevitably been disruption – the ...”

“... Liberal Democrats will provide safe refuge for swing voters in the South disgusted by culture war sadism; if the SNP’s finance scandal festers Labour might even regain some of its former Scottish bastions. The nation is miserable and conditions are favourable, but this hardly diminishes Starmer’s achievement: he has isolated the left within his ...”

“... of English – seen by Eagleton as a pernicious mystification serving the interests of the ruling class – in the first chapter of his bestseller Literary Theory (1983). But Collini chides Eagleton for misrepresenting a central element in his story and observes that the related thesis of Chris Baldick in The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848-1932 ...”

“... political vocabulary. The Iranian Mujahiddin (leftist supporters of Bani Sadr currently waging war upon the Ayatollahs) are described as munafiqin in the official government media. It is a part of this fragmented and turbulent world of political Islam that V.S. Naipaul sets out to investigate in his latest book. His travels take him to ...”

“... movie career of Ronald Reagan, his analysis of The Birth of a Nation and his meditations on Cold War anti-Communist movies are characterised by their lucidity, invention and historical depth. He locates the origins of The Jazz Singer a century before the movie’s release, in the age of Andrew Jackson. As the frontiersmen Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo ...”

“... to do. Then fashions changed, the ‘great women’ were left behind, and the search for working-class heroines began. All our attention is claimed by Claire Lacombe and Pauline Léon, of the Revolutionary Republican Women. Is this shift helpful, or productive of real knowledge? Godineau dares to wonder. Certainly, it tells us more about our own concerns ...”

“... life, and in ours. Pandemics, for example, the Trump presidency, #MeToo, exit from Afghanistan and war in Ukraine; and for Batuman personally, as she put it in a recent interview, those five years chart the process of coming to terms with her queer identity in her late thirties. Selin isn’t into history, but history happens anyway, and the challenge for ...”

“... on the important matters being discussed, but the poem ends:Maybe what they say is trueOf war and war’s alarms;But O that I were young againAnd held her in my arms.Thomas Mann comes into all this because, in a lightly sardonic spirit, Yeats took as the epigraph to his poem a phrase from Mann which MacLeish had ...”

“... settling in Highgate. Gellner’s parents were representative of that stratum of educated, middle-class Jews who, profoundly grateful to Britain for providing them with a home, nonetheless continued throughout the war to speak to each other in the language of the now hated enemy. Ernest finished his schooling at St ...”