“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to say, belongs mostly to power. Inoculation by push-button has consistently reinforced the class distinction between those who own or manipulate information and those who have little to dispose of other than their energy. Plotnick’s instructive term for the capacity created in this way is ‘digital command’. Pressure applied by a finger, or ...”

“... a physical and psychic toll, what Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett call ‘the hidden injuries of class’. On the kill floors, most workers are ‘at-will’ employees and can be fired at any time. In 2019, the annual turnover in many Texan slaughterhouses was 100 per cent.The ethnographer Timothy Pachirat describes industrial slaughterhouses – along with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be friendly but soon lost interest. She was expecting another child, who was to be a dashing war hero and heartbreaker called George. Economies must be practised, with an eye to George’s future. Stephen and Andrew no longer had cake for tea, Elsa lashed herself into furies over spilled jam. Depressing Scotticisms flew from her tongue: ‘Mony a mickle ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... any potential abuse of power.’ But the foreign funds that flooded into Afghanistan after the war distorted this relationship, creating an elite class divorced from the rest of the people. That the international community continued to back these strongmen mystified her. Hamidi was reluctant to name names, but I thought ...”

“... of Boty’s lost painting Scandal ’63. His memories, which stretch back before the Second World War, are the historical elements of Smith’s collage and serve as reminders that times have been worse than they were in 2016, despite the novel’s opening lines: ‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again.’ The allusions are as plentiful ...”

“... insanity to avoid a treason charge for the seditious radio talks he delivered in Italy during the war. He remained at St Elizabeth’s for 12 years. The old man McLuhan and Kenner saw there wasn’t insane. He was the same brilliant, manipulative, unrepentant fascist and antisemite he had always been and remained until his death, despite occasional public ...”

“... to begin a paragraph by paraphrasing some commonly held view of the English: ‘Removing the lower-class Englishman from his own environment evidently had the effect of loosening his moral moorings’; ‘The English were proud of their lack of vindictiveness’; ‘For the English the most savage war seemed a kind of ...”