“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... episode. Rómulo Gallegos, another novelist, was Venezuela’s first elected President after the war. The current Foreign Minister of Argentina, Guido di Tella, a distinguished economic historian, is a long-time fellow of St Antony’s. Cardoso, co-author of the most influential single work of South American social science in the Sixties – Dependency and ...”

“... 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 What’s more, his research has been assiduous not just in the sources (many of them unpublished) bearing directly on Hill’s life, but also ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The first thing about Harold Macmillan was his bravery, and it was the last thing too. In the Great War he was wounded five times, at the Battle of Loos and at the Somme. At Delville Wood he was hit in the thigh and pelvis and rolled down into a large shell-hole, where he lay for the next ten hours, alternately dosing himself with morphine and reading Aeschylus ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... North-West. They also had public advantages. They might gain in prestige and influence in time of war by recruiting regiments from the sons of their tenants: in return, the tenants expected to continue in their holdings. But by the 1840s the adverse publicity resulting from the Highland clearances meant that the great power of an estate to order people’s ...”