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“... the rent, but his family didn’t have the crippling debts that frequently end any possibility of class mobility. He was the valedictorian at his prestigious high school, and a wealthy banker, moved by his speech, offered to pay all the expenses at whichever university he chose. He studied microbiology at Yale, but never stopped selling or using drugs. In ...”

“... angles indebted to Hitchcock, set in a Germanic Europe devastated by environmental catastrophe or war. The jaded heroes roamed through wasteland, abandoned buildings, rubble, degraded suburbs, finding Gothic horrors: former Nazis dead in overflowing baths of blood, suicides dangling from ropes, bleeding whores, dying horses and abandoned children. In The ...”

“... a common little thing’. Richard Eyre said that ‘if it weren’t for the sharp English upper-class voice, you’d say she looks like a Maltese landlady.’ Cecil Beaton described her as vulgar and later as ‘a poor midgety brute’ who had ‘gone to pot … her complexion now a dirty negligee pink satin’. Only matched by Alan Clark’s diary ...”

“... in the British Museum, or the uniform of the Light Brigade is illustrated in the Imperial War Museum. Each item tells us something about its time and place, certainly not everything, but something. Nevertheless, they become a good deal more vivid and more informative when we are given a living context for the artefacts. The most exquisitely chipped ...”

“... during a long double session with her therapist (she tells her family that she’s at an exercise class) – include some of the best and strangest writing that Franzen has ever done. Outwardly she’s an exemplary pastor’s wife. She remembers the names of parishioners and gives ‘moderate, sensible, incremental’ advice. But Perry’s suffering reminds ...”

“... him – his education, sophistication and relative wealth – ceased to have any allure once the war began. If The Book of Blam isn’t straightforwardly a ‘Holocaust novel’, it’s nevertheless about the Holocaust, since what happened in Novi Sad between 1940 and 1945 radically altered everyone’s status and every relationship. Blam appears to be the ...”

“... in the Morning Star, he has aligned himself with a new generation of popular protest – anti-war, anti-globalisation – as well as remaining as soundbiteable as ever on hardy perennials such as European integration, industrial democracy, reform of the House of Lords and the royal prerogative. Benn is fashionably unfashionable. The smoking classes have ...”

“... and Sans soleil (1982). La Jetée, his only fully fictional film, is set in post-World War Three Paris, and tells the story of a man troubled by two images. One is of a windswept woman standing on a pier; it is from his childhood, but he is unable to place it. The other is of a man dying on the same pier. The two images must be related but the man ...”

“... in the 1950s when it was discovered that she did not have a ‘suitable’ – that is, working-class or peasant – background.) Thanks to her rehabilitation, Magdushka (she is named only once in the novel) has recently traded her one-bedroom flat for a larger apartment. Desperate to spend as much time as possible on her writing, she decides to hire a ...”

“... on a fellowship, purportedly to write ‘a long, research-driven poem’ about the Spanish Civil War’s ‘literary legacy’, goes into the Prado and heads for Rogier Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross. He has been standing in front of it every morning since he arrived in Madrid, but today he finds a man in his place, facing the painting – or ...”

“... counter-insurgencies like Malaya and Kenya, and only too pleased to be told that there was no Cold War reason for getting involved. Colonial governors thought they knew better, so would often disregard or cherry-pick MI5’s reports, frustrating the spooks, who were likely to take the blame. (Walton hints pretty broadly that he thinks something similar ...”

“... to the setting: a well-to-do provincial French town in the years just preceding the Great War, with municipal meetings and busybody neighbours and the promise of much Bovary-like behaviour. Despite that promise, which is more than fulfilled, the novel’s opening pages nearly risk sending readers to sleep with long passages of dialogue that discuss ...”

“... the ‘Anglo-Vernacular’ version of the Upper School Certificate with flying colours (First Class), having attended courses in religious knowledge, ‘Vernacular’, English, arithmetic and historical geography. For Mdala, a chi-Yao speaker, Vernacular was the language of a conquered ethnic group, the Nyanja. Mdala left the mission in 1913 to work as a ...”

“... examiner at military school just before the Revolution (he ranked the future emperor 42nd in a class of 58) and a decade later welcomed his former student as a mathematics fellow in the new Institut de France: ‘We expected everything from you, general, except geometry lectures!’ Laplace was in many ways the Bonaparte of physical sciences: their ...”

“... not very fondly remembered. For the generation who were in their twenties during the Second World War, which included my parents and their friends, to say that someone ‘sat there like Queen Mary’ was to indicate that a terminal blight had been cast over the occasion. James Pope-Hennessy, born in 1916, belonged to that generation. He came from a ...”