“... Irish economy and domestic agriculture until, by the early 19th century, there survived a peasant class more miserable than any other in Europe, ‘a social order’, as Salaman says, ‘in which the distinction between the amenities of human life and those of the beasts of the field had become blurred’. In their turf cabins, the enormous families, six or ...”

“... George Orwell remarked that English anti-semitism might be regarded as a fairly harmless upper-class habit until 1933, but not after that. The essay on Disraeli, it seems, was published in 1931. MacCarthy also felt strongly about the avant-garde in the arts, and wrote some just things about the manner in which very poor works might make their ...”

“... intellect, Fulfilled creation singing its own praise. His small theatre of the Residenz In World War II was bombed to smithereens Yet could be put back as it was, because Its dazzling inner shell was lath and gauze, A kit of plaster panels and silk screens They stashed away until the world saw sense. At Vegas, the last Grand Prix of the year Before he died ...”

“... from New Orleans called Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun; it was a condemnation of George Bush’s War on Terror and of his epic mishandling of the storm relief effort in 2005. As instruments of enlightenment and weapons of social justice, these books worked: they vividly illustrate the way the poor, dispossessed and dark-skinned tend to suffer the most in ...”

“... it. For anyone who can see, and God knows Cobb doesn’t go about with his eyes shut, a first-class funeral may often be tragic, but it is also much better than a family dinner: it is a kind of photographic developer and fixer of the life of the notables. Especially in the department of the Nord: in Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing this sad ceremony was the ...”

“... varies in quality and age: old, formerly private, apartment blocks include some excellent pre-war flats as well as some illequipped and decaying properties. There are also some new apartments built to fairly high standards. All of these are let at very low rents. Co-operative housing construction is in various ways subsidised by the state, but the owners ...”

“... her relationship with her first husband, the Greek schoolteacher Dmitri, who is decidedly middle-class, and a member of a subject people, while the Young Turk Selim, Nilofer’s second husband, is a strong supporter of women’s rights. Interestingly, abolishing the veil is the only one of his stated aims that still troubles modern Turkey. The irony is that ...”

“... and the twins’ joyful childhood (‘You came from happiness, my darlings’). Mike’s lower-class father is warmly embraced by the High Court judge; there are glorious days at Dulwich Picture Gallery, picnics in St James’s Park. Lest we gag on treacle, Paula assures us that a ‘happy home’ is a ‘fantasy out of which we all have to be ...”

“... resistance is not possible, so all we can do till the revolutionary spirit of the global working class is renewed is defend what remains of the welfare state, confronting those in power with demands we know they cannot fulfil, and otherwise withdraw into cultural studies, where one can quietly pursue the work of criticism. Or, it emphasises the fact that the ...”

“... to Rome itself, to Polybius, Sallust, Livy and Plutarch; to Appian and Cassius Dio on the civil war; to Tacitus and the self-serving Josephus, sensibly changing sides in the course of the Jewish revolt in Palestine in 67-69 and surviving to write its history; and to Ammianus Marcellinus, an amiable pagan from Antioch, who was writing at the end of what ...”

“... will accept Mr Shaw’s view of what seemed to everybody else to be a calamity of first-class magnitude,’ Chesterton wrote of the fire in his history of the theatre, ‘for very great good has sprung from that mighty blaze.’ He hoped that the ‘dry rot’ that was ‘sapping our national sanity and virility’ would be cut out. ‘Now that ...”

“... Avricourt cemetery. But even after the Armistice, France wouldn’t allow the disinterment of its war dead. So in January 1919 Moïse engaged a local schoolteacher – for an unspecified sum – to exhume the coffin, presumably after dark, store it in his house, and arrange for its onward transportation to Paris. Moïse, McAuley writes, ‘was a consummate ...”

“... as much as eight ounces and were marked to show their nominal value. Only during the Second Punic War, which began in 218 Bc, did they begin to produce precious metal coinage in the manner of the Greeks. The first silver denarii appeared halfway through the war, in 211. Coins were struck in increasing quantities as the ...”

“... which demands the expansive treatment Bair has given it. Beauvoir lived at the centre of post-war French intellectual ferment; in addition to her feminist and philosophical writings, she wrote six novels, four volumes of memoirs, and books on America, China, old age, sickness and death. As ‘Sainte Simone’, she became the mother of the modern women’s ...”

“... true, are doing badly. And the rich are getting conspicuously richer. But the forecasts of civil war tend to unreality in two ways: first, those who make these forecasts are usually not those who are about to make civil war themselves (though they claim to know a man who will); and second, they often inflate what is going ...”