“... 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 ...”

“... soldiers welcomes us like greeters at a conference. We fill in forms for accreditation to the war. Halfway down the forms ask: Do you need anthrax? Do you need smallpox? We answer no. I had the first anthrax injection in London last week. Paul hasn’t been vaccinated for either. You’re supposed to have three anthrax injections to be protected. We catch ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... production and perpetuate ideology, and did not clash with the whims and prejudices of the ruling class. The institute established to care for Lenin’s mummy grew and grew. A mausoleum trio, including Zbarsky, roamed the Soviet sector of postwar Germany with permission to loot whatever they could find to help in their work. Every scientist in the institute ...”

“... a devious Christian history professor with a tragic romantic past. We watch her teaching, taking a class through Adolphe, a work important to her own book on The Romantic Dilemma, and one which enables her to reflect sombrely on such painful sentences as the one beginning: Mais quand on voit l’angoisse qui résulte de ces liens brisés ... Again the frieze ...”

“... recovery and embark on a second career, this time as an elder statesman. In the First World War Asquith brought him back as First Lord of the Admiralty, and Lloyd George made him Foreign Secretary. An elderly and immaculate grandee, he was still to be seen pottering about doing the occasional odd job for Baldwin’s Cabinet in the late 1920s. His career ...”