“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... so much that was to come flowed from its design – the separate entrances for first and second class, the novel situation for early passengers that you went in at one level, then climbed steps to meet your conveyance at another. He floats no resolution to the tension between heritage and modernisation. His book is part social history, part architectural ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The dominant early scholarship held to the view that the underlying forces behind the post-war integration of Western Europe should be sought in the growth of objective – not only economic, but also social and cultural – interdependencies between the states that made up the initial Coal and Steel Community and its sequels. The tenor of this first ...”

“... a result of white encroachments on aboriginal hunting grounds, culminating in a full-scale Black War in the late 1820s – Tasmanians against colonial troops and armed settlers. That wasn’t the only massacre. Some of the European combatants were vicious, and clearly meant to exterminate the natives, not just defeat them – Lawson provides some gory ...”

“... deprecatingly, as the slightly above average product of a lycée-trained, French upper-middle-class background ‘that might have been used to illustrate the theses of Pierre Bourdieu’. Despite this insightful modesty, he assumes his readers share precisely this background and its code of sentiments, including its delicate political conservatism and ...”

“... had been in the habit of telling Hitler what Hitler didn’t want to hear, specifically that the war on the Eastern Front was unwinnable. A dictator’s Weltanschauung is necessarily not that of even his grandest minions; it is not an empirical construct susceptible to challenge or correction. Todt died when his apparently sabotaged plane crashed on take-off ...”

“... is also much in fashion in universities, and most of Ireland ticks that box too. The war which recently afflicted the six counties still under British rule (the ‘sick counties’, Flann O’Brien called them) also brought the world’s attention to bear on the island as a whole. Devastated in the 19th century by a famine in which British ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”