“... in the claustrophobic rooms of a long-ago commonsense Englishness, with its petty snobberies and class anxieties, its put-downs (that ‘calm sureness … wasn’t bred in any charity school’), its antisemitism (‘the pliant philosophy of a race long used to lying low’), its parades of snooty know-how (‘Wigmore Street’s clients do not stay in town ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... could be straight from Paul Mendez’s first novel, Rainbow Milk, which examines issues of race, class and sexual identity through the prism of millennial culture. About a third of the way through the book, its protagonist, Jesse McCarthy, summons the courage to enter a gay bar by invoking the sassiness of a member of the Sugababes: ‘He wanted to feel like ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Saddam was the very price demanded by the Iranians as a precondition for parley in the last Gulf War. Most Americans are still unsure of how to distinguish between Hussein of Jordan and the Beast of Baghdad (or is it the Butcher of Basra? The Brute of Babylon?) – a distinction which led the New York Times to run a special article on Arabic nomenclature. In ...”

“... Since the Second World War, the cutting edge of English historical studies has been not ‘world history’ but English local history, a fact by no means adequately reflected in the Report of the National Curriculum History Working Group, nor even in the menus of courses currently on offer in university history departments ...”

“... of progress’. Yet contemporaries compared the gravity of this situation to that of the Great War, and its consequence was, in Stuart Ball’s words, ‘a reshaping of the party system, and a new basis in the pattern of issues, which was to hold sway for the following fifty years’. The difficulties of 1929 to 1931 were of three kinds ...”

“... over other professional men. It was not possible to denigrate these men as ignorant, lower-class or foreign; even the experts in magic were not the crones found in literature but respected men. Behind the image of rational Greek man – an image promoted by élite Greek literature as well as its later élite commentators – was a culture that ...”

“... as a musician: she was about to go to Vienna, to study under Schönberg, when the First World War broke out. When her father died, leaving her, as she put it, ‘mutilated’, she saw that it would be better to earn her own living than stay in the country and quarrel with her mother. She came to London, and worked as an editor on the monumental Tudor ...”