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“... son of an ancient noble family, but his club foot kept him from the military vocation of his class, and led his parents to treat him with even more indifference than French aristocrats ordinarily showed their children. In his memoirs, he recounted that an uncle was shocked to find him, alone and in rags, chasing sparrows, and took him to an elegant house ...”

“... years before’. His biographer describes him as ‘classically laissez-faire in everything from war to income tax’. Nobody ever called him a progressive.Even Ross’s fabled editorial prowess is portrayed with condescension, sometimes by those who come to praise him. We read of his pedantry, his literal-mindedness, his mad grammarian’s ...”

“... the novel’s account of the emergence of 20th-century feminisms at once within and against the class and gender constraints prevalent in 1880. Its final section, Woolf noted in her diary, would need to be as weighty as its first, and ‘must in fact give the other side, the submerged side of that’. Trevelyan, by contrast, remained a stranger to ...”

“... for which the American government might kill a woman. Female traitors during the Second World War – Tokyo Rose, Axis Sally, the ‘Doll Woman’ – had received prison terms. And no American civilian, man or woman, had ever received the death penalty in peacetime for ‘conspiracy to commit espionage’, the official charge against her. Almost until ...”

“... characters in Leeds, possibly because it wasn’t affluent enough or because this was during the war when cats had to pull in their belts along with everyone else. 2 March, Venice. Fur much in evidence in Venice, where they plainly have no truck with animal rights, old ladies in their minks queuing along with everyone else to get on the vaporetto. One reason ...”

“... Kenneth Branagh​ ’s Belfast is set in the early months of the Troubles, in a mixed working-class district that is cleared of its Catholic residents by a loyalist mob. Paving stones are lifted to barricade the end of the street. Neighbourhood vigilantes are replaced by paramilitaries and the British army. Though the representation of events is spare and often stylised, the film catches the impact of the crisis not just on smashed and burned terraced houses but on the fabric of everyday decency ...”

“... writers:Yet it could not pass entirely unnoticed that if the forefathers of the colonial class in Ireland had been a little less intent on undermining the native culture, their emancipated sons and daughters would have needed to busy themselves rather less with restoring it. Before Lady Gregory came to collect Gaelic folk tales, her future husband ...”

“... as describing a catholicity of arguments without a prayer of resolution – battles without a war. I doubt Hughes would agree to being labelled ‘post-modern’ – he barely avoids giving Derrida a silly nickname – but then no honourable intellectual wants a label. Yet the label works, because Hughes’s method is by and large positional, governed by ...”

“... expansionism which brought all else in its wake was connected with narrowing of the upper-class family around the male line, ‘no conclusive answer is presently available.’ But this has the makings of a cop-out. As it happens, one of those brain-teasers that give the statistically-minded no trouble but are agony for the unfortunate remainder ...”

“... ministers cannot be sued in law on the ground that to admit this would be to admit that the Civil War never occurred. The Conservative Party’s Euro-haters, who would die in the last ditch to defend the rights of Parliament, turn into pussy-cats the moment the word ‘confidence’ is mentioned. Neither the Conservative nor the Labour Party has risen to the ...”

“... the country house near Palermo that was the model for the Villa Salina in the novel, survived the war, briefly became a fashionable nightclub, but is now derelict; his mother’s family palace, at Santa Margherita di Belice – the Donnafugata of the book – was sold in 1925 by her brother, the Socialist deputy Alessandro Tasca to pay his debts. In 1968, the ...”

“... Cavour, the ideal of a cool, far-sighted statesman; Garibaldi, the perfect chieftain in irregular war, dashing but rash and hot-headed; Mazzini, the typical conspirator, ardent and fanatical – all of them full of generosity and devotion.’ Mack Smith’s Cavour and Garibaldi were literally reversed. The 1954 text is sprinkled with references to ...”

“... of his system, and could therefore explain how the Americans sustained a four-year revolutionary war without having any secured money – by printing it, and waiting for the inevitable depreciation, which meant that everybody redeemed its value in the long run. However, Article I of the US Constitution is not in the spirit of Law, for it insists on gold and ...”

“... old Edouard Corbière, a popular novelist and ship-owner, Tristan occupied an odd niche in the class system of the day, a place set aside for the disreputable, unhygienic but harmlessly eccentric offspring of the energetic and successful. (Flaubert was another example.) Tristan was not merely a disappointment to his father, however. Paternal disapproval of ...”

“... inherited a state in crisis. When he came to the throne in 1640, 22 years into the Thirty Years’ War, much of his land was under Swedish occupation; the people in his capital, Berlin, were starving; and many of the city’s buildings had been burned down. He needed an army but this was difficult in a state made up of a patchwork of territories scattered ...”