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“... your elders.’Religious education became a focus of reform. Parish priests were ordered to hold a class at least once every six weeks. Children were expected to know the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed in English; instead of the Ave Maria, a prayer of grace, they learned the Ten Commandments, a list of rules. Godparents were deputised to ensure that ...”

“... on a very large sheet of paper? Cela began the novel in 1945, when he was 29. Born to a middle-class family in rural Galicia, he had moved to Madrid as a child. Having decided to study medicine, he caught tuberculosis and in 1931 was sent to a sanatorium, where he dedicated himself to reading classic Spanish literature. By 1937 he had recovered ...”

“... the trend. With the aid of shaky cue-cards and overemphatic announcers, Eisenhower sells his own war record next to a fear about other people’s: FIRST ANNOUNCER: The man from Abilene. Out of the heartland of America, out of this small frame house in Abilene, Kansas, came a man, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Through the crucial hour of historic D-Day, he brought ...”

“... that outright annexation would provoke rival empires to counter-annexations, touching off World War One in Kow-loon instead of Sarajevo. Why 99 years? Because a lease needs a date. Why did the Qing dynasty sign? Because its last hope lay in getting foreign help against its own people, and it was ready to sign anything. The lease was never ratified, no rent ...”

“... the obedience of the organised clinching the apathy of the disorganised. But the new political class in the Soviet Union today is not confined to the area of leaders and demonstrators active in civil society: it also includes the younger cadres of the state, who follow public affairs no less passionately than their counterparts in the electoral arena, from ...”

“... productivity, he writes: ‘I am hard pressed to argue, as I did in the 1960s, that the post-Civil War subsidised rails from the Mississippi to the West Coast were a wholly bad idea.’ The same flirtation with activist-state liberalism is evident in his discussion of the ‘extensive technical training of our military during the ...”

“... Games is a story of violence not intruding from without, but erupting from within an affluent class that is more precisely observed in the Austrian than in the American version. And Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, two talented actors, render the wife and husband more sympathetic, more endearing, than they are in the Austrian version. Why should it be ...”

“... heading away from the overcast politics of the industrialised countries in search of a ‘messiah class’, as he explains in Praised Be Our Lords: the peasantries and otherwise exploited communities of ‘colonial and semi-colonial’ countries. His own Adoration took place in Bolivia, where he stumbled on the manger in all its simplicity: the tin mines of ...”

“... Great Britain, three-quarters of them in London. Between 1881 and the outbreak of the First World War, over a hundred and fifty thousand East European Jews settled in the British Isles and swamped the ‘native’ Anglo-Jewish community where rabbis wore clerical collars and were called ‘Reverend’ and the Chief Rabbi appeared in episcopal gaiters. One of ...”

“... in an age which saw the rise of the Third Reich, the defeat of European humanism, the Second World War and its aftermath. Even Bertolt Brecht, little given to public self-doubt or literary self-deprecation, questions (in the most famous of the Svendborg Poems of 1939) any man’s right to equanimity in an age when A conversation about trees is almost a crime ...”

“... that the [British] government wanted kept secret,’ writes Michael Goodman of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. And yet Pincher believes he never threatened the security of the state – that would be the work of a traitor, which is the way he described Snowden in a recent television interview. But if he wasn’t a bean-spiller in ...”

“... of this volcanic biography. Henderson’s mother, Janet, had served as a nurse in the First World War, then returned to lose her own battle in Britain. Thirty-nine and unmarried, she became pregnant within weeks of the armistice, much to the horror of her well-off Dundee family. Neat penetrates the various legends put about by Henderson, who didn’t at all ...”

“... perched on the banks of the Rhine. Of course I’d heard of West Point, where the officer class of the US military is trained. I’d just never known exactly where it was, and hadn’t expected to see it. It makes the west bank of the Hudson still more Salterian country; besides raising a family on either side of the Tappan Zee Bridge in the 1960s and ...”

“... atrocities happen every day, in places presumed to be ‘safe’ as well as those beset by civil war. The Brothers provides essential Soviet and post-Soviet geopolitical background, charting the Tsarnaev family’s peregrinations from Kyrgyzstan (to where Stalin brutally transplanted the entire Chechen population in 1944) to Novosibirsk in south central ...”

“... and the West Country. Charles had served as a private in the Welsh Regiment in the First World War and, on his return, everybody had assumed he would follow Walter in rejecting agricultural work for a career in the Great Western Railway. Instead, he tended livestock on land that was not his own. Beatrice supplemented his poverty wages with sewing work. It ...”