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“... detail of local power and society. Things are not much better when organisations rely on middle-class or English-speaking Iraqis for information. It is not only Ahmed Chalabi who proved to have little idea about the situation in Iraq. Saddam’s regime worked hard to fragment and isolate the population. Religious sheikhs in Karbala do not know how to assess ...”

“... family. To regard the wife working for material gain as an anomaly is to accept Victorian middle-class ideals, and to assume, as indeed did many Victorian commentators, that these extended over the whole population, and that they had been the norm in past times. Caroline Davidson’s grasp of the historic family economy is weak: this is shown by her remark ...”

“... Sisi put Washington’s rhetoric to good use, assuring the president that Egypt is ‘fighting a war against terrorism … The Egyptian army is undertaking major operations in the Sinai so it is not transformed into a base for terrorism that will threaten its neighbours and make Egypt unstable. If Egypt is unstable then the entire region is ...”

“... in the east Slav world for two viral YouTube moments. One shows him paying his respects to the war dead in a high wind when, at the exact moment of his solemn bow, a large wreath, mounted on a stand, falls forward and hits him on the head. The other is an exchange at a televised press conference in December. When a journalist, Mustafa Nayem, asked about ...”

“... in the grand manner of the Rocky Mountain Sublime. Social satire and protest began to matter: class and race became visible – i.e. permissible – in painting; the past was reinvented and put beside representative objects of the present day. In the course of the 1930s, the nation’s painters showed the streets of Harlem and the factories of Henry ...”

“... even its expression is bathetic. Yates’s difficult childhood, his time as a soldier during World War Two, his painful personal and professional life after the war, his alcoholism, are all revisited obsessively in his fiction. Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road is a young veteran whose high hopes for the future dissolve ...”

“... supplied the world with wheat. The British and French blockade of Odessa during the Crimean War made the world realise it needed to diversify wheat supplies; Kansas and Nebraska rushed to meet the need. Odessa was also one of the centres of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, with the proportion of Jews holding steady at around a third of the ...”

“... Anti-immigrant sentiments were cleverly fused by the Cheney-Bush administration with its War on Terror, and in the current rhetoric – exemplified by the fanatical anchorman Lou Dobbs on CNN – ‘terrorist’ and ‘illegal alien’ have become interchangeable terms in the fear-mongering over ‘security’ and ‘protecting our borders’. A ...”

“... in a quarter of an hour’s time. I suddenly remembered an inspired aperçu from near the end of War and Peace – which Tolstoy wrote in his prime. Pierre brings the old Countess Rostov a miniature of her dead husband in a locket. So far from being grateful she becomes irritable, for it happened this was not the right time of the day for indulging ...”

“... of the difficulty of his project, which is to sketch the history of British art in the post-war years. The sentence occurs in an apologetic introduction, and it indicates some of the difficulties inherent in the author’s approach to his book. To say that the past can only be perceived through the medium of the present is a truism, and to add that what ...”

“... along the gutters of well-to-do streets, singing for pennies. It was, as it turned out, a first-class training for 28 years as a journalist in the lobbies of the Palace of Westminster. These self-indulgent memories came to mind some weeks ago when most of the newspapers were full of the libel action between Andrew Neil of the Sunday Times and Peregrine ...”

“... in Africa, and generally gave white-settler claims to Olympian power a suitably upper-class tone. Next there was the arresting spectacle of a peasant army of rebels, who fought for years against overwhelming odds and under crushingly harsh conditions, enduring death and disablement while remaining, as Maloba reminds us, from first to last ...”

“... which makes them into the threads of a very uncomfortable web indeed, one in which post-war American society is caricatured with remorseless precision, its values inflated into religious terms that seem ludicrous only at first. The book projects the visionary nature of the marketplace, the apotheosis of the entrepreneur, the patriarchal grandeur of ...”

“... remarkably sympathetic to the foreigners he depicted. This was perhaps a sign both of Sadahide’s class and the times he lived through, before the anti-foreign backlash set in. Sadahide even has nice things to say about blacks, who came along with their white masters as servants. ‘The source of life for these people,’ he writes, struggling with an alien ...”

“... final meeting was, according to Pitt, a measly 2749 (of whom I was one). But immediately after the war, and well into the Sixties, its crowds were immense: a tiny course, it nonetheless packed in 25,000 at its re-opening meeting in July 1947, and 12,000 at its first evening meeting in 1955. Because it was so compact – it was known as the Frying Pan on ...”