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“... At the end of the Second World War, an anonymous pamphlet surfaced in the seminaries of Qom, the bastion of Shia learning. The Unveiling of Secrets accused Iran’s monarchy of treason: ‘In your European hats, you strolled the boulevards, ogling the naked girls, and thought yourselves fine fellows, unaware that foreigners were carting off the country’s patrimony and resources ...”

“... year of his disgrace, the sleek, balding, faintly exotic Jack Profumo was secretary of state for war. It sounds like an important job – what could matter more than war for the functioning of the state? Undoubtedly this helped to give impetus to the Profumo affair. Help! The ...”

“... rendered life itself all but impossible for those who have survived Israel’s bombardment. The war was provoked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack, but the desire to inflict suffering on Gaza, not just on Hamas, didn’t arise on 7 October. Here is Ariel Sharon’s son Gilad in 2012: ‘We need to flatten entire neighbourhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of ...”

“... on to note that Irishmen were particularly prone to this temptation, for the gap between ruling-class pretence and brutal reality had been wider for longer in Ireland than anywhere else, and this had affected even those who (like himself) were sufficiently privileged to be spared the worst of that reality. ‘For some Irishmen, including some who were not ...”

“... done this’ – and, for an English audience especially, it offers the nagging fascinations of class: we half-relish their snobbery and élitism, half-revel in the righteous disdain these provoke. All this is a matter of broad cultural psychology, and complaining about it is like carping at the current placings in the pop charts – harmless, but pretty ...”

“... being taught to despise them. Leavisism, as a cult of the years before and after the Second World War, cleverly adapted the study of literature to the requirements of the age of meritocracy. It selected from among the best of their generation – undergraduates studying the humanities at Cambridge – a yet smaller cadre of the highly serious. It drilled them ...”

“... to Lucullus in the hope of a suitable reward: ‘But when Pompey took over the command of the war he treated as enemies all those who had done any favour to Lucullus because of his personal hostility to him; and when he had finished the war and gone home he saw to it that any honours which Lucullus had promised to ...”

“... of Israel (i.e. those who did not become refugees in 1948). The Israeli Arabs are already second-class citizens, suffering from subtle methods of apartheid in areas such as housing and unemployment: the removal of their voting rights would reduce them to a status not much higher than that of South Africa’s blacks. Yet Dr O’Brien envisages certain ...”

“... ended in 1914. What followed cast things in a very different light. German intellectuals went to war with a shrill defence of the peculiar virtues supposedly embodied in German Kultur. German inwardness and spiritual depth became ideological weapons against Russian ‘barbarism’ and the ‘superficial’ British and French. Thomas Mann’s Observations of ...”

“... his fingers are calloused by hard work and scoffs, Bolshevik-style, at the pampered hands of the class enemy, the banker Gusinsky. Jews like Gusinsky, homosexuals, intellectuals of any kind and women who go out to work are all subjected to the contempt of a Soviet patriot – a contempt which has its roots in Korzhakov’s strong institutional loyalty to his ...”

“... daily routine, from the morning Swedish drill and ‘experimental breakfasts’ through to tugs of war, convivial country dancing and 11 p.m. lights out. While for Gibbs, they’re all about flirtations with Fabian flappers. Unsurprisingly, his belief that Shaw’s personal life and passions are a more secure clue to his life than his convictions leads Gibbs ...”

“... When​ Putin’s holy war began Alexey checked himself into a psychiatric ward. He had come back to Russia in 2012 after working as a journalist in London, where we met (I had just moved to London after a decade in Moscow). The protests against Putin were cresting, and change seemed imminent. ‘London is boring, everything has already happened here,’ Alexey said ...”

“... in the history of everyday life, from Viking longships to the Home Front during the Second World War. What’s taught at more advanced levels is narrower and more problematical. Yet here it reflects not just the choices made by teachers and schools, but also the preferences of students themselves, who from the age of 14 have a good deal of freedom to choose ...”

“... writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb maintained that there was nothing preordained in Lebanon’s civil war, that Lebanon had been ‘at peace for centuries’. And in the Balkans in the 1990s, people insisted: ‘I did not even know people’s ethnic group – I have a Serb father, a Croat mother … We were Yugoslavs.’ All these countries can offer equally ...”

“... A Place in the Sun (1951), he is someone the older men doubt. In the latter two films, it’s a class suspicion, a closing of ranks against the interloper, but it’s also a generational matter, an effect of style. Among other things Clift represented the men who had passed through the war. Although he was unfit for ...”