“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is what he was. He stole other people’s things. ‘The younger element, brought up after the war and influenced by Hollywood’s gangster films, thought that guns were glamorous instead of just dangerous,’ writes Reynolds, himself an evacuee during the war. ‘They made armed robbery fashionable but shut themselves ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Fitzpatrick’s chief themes is the way individuals edited and presented their lives, and their class identities, both to the authorities and to one another. She uncovers citizens who falsified their credentials in order to conceal their bourgeois past, and con-artists who exploited the opportunities provided by the upheaval and chaos that followed the ...”

“... his feet were firmly on the ground either side of it: fitting, no doubt, for a decorated World War One infantryman who liked to stand and be counted. In Champagne in 1914, when an enemy shell landed nearby and two of his colleagues wisely flung themselves to the ground, De Gaulle remained in the asparagus position. As a soldier and a statesman, he was ...”

“... on Ukraine has produced the largest and swiftest mass movement of women since the Second World War. More than four million women have been displaced within Ukraine and around the same number have fled the country. Many of those who left, congregating in towns and cities in Poland, or taking buses and trains to other European capitals, went ...”

“... in the Northern states. The South had always been pro-British, dating back to the Civil War, when it was to Britain that the Confederacy had looked for international support. After the Union’s victory, the South no longer had an army of its own. Its martial culture, therefore, could only find expression through the American army, which made the ...”

“... same authors, which provided a picture of the global imperium supposed to have followed the Cold War – not the American Empire, but a wider settlement of which US supremacy was just one part. This imperium has generated global resistance, which all purchasers are now invited to approve, in the name of democracy. Hardt and Negri’s multitude should not be ...”

“... the ‘tribe of second-rate young women’ with whom Barney surrounded herself. The Second World War found them stranded together in the hills above Florence – for the duration – in Brooks’s new home, the Villa Sant’Agnese. It was a disastrous experiment in cohabitation. Both by now were in their sixties. Barney was heartsick over the ...”

“... year was unusually favourable. Climbing without supplementary oxygen (pioneered by First World War bomber pilots) Major Edward Norton of the British Army and a London surgeon, Howard Somervell, got to 28,126 feet, less than 900 feet below the summit, at which height the atmosphere holds only a third of the oxygen we breathe at sea level. Four days later ...”

“... Burton. Only losers leave their stories to the East London Advertiser and the more literate class of probation officer. Take that McVicar. He was totally out of order. An armed robber, ‘one of the top men of his profession’ (Lambrianou), he blew all his advantages. Flash bastard, he decided to become his own ghost. Someone should have marked his ...”

“... Forum on Literature and Art’, a text which declared the subservience of literature to the class struggle. And in Stockholm before receiving the prize, Mo Yan spoke up in favour of censorship: it was, he said, a bit like airport security. The cadres were already moving swiftly to turn his ancestral village into a literary theme park. Among the ...”