“... 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 ...”

“... two decades after the publication of The Charioteer, Renault’s 1953 novel about a Second World War soldier trying to come to terms with his homosexuality, carrying a copy became a kind of gay semaphore.Renault’s Greek novels were virtually all Bildungsromane or Künstlerromane. Her own journey to artistic maturity had been long and difficult: her first ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... guys doing things together, like the time a group of dads showed up at someone’s Pilates class. There were movies and TV shows about the problems of contemporary manhood, some concerned (Adolescence), some satirical (Friendship). Mark Zuckerberg, whose male-to-male transition included bulking up, putting on an XL T-shirt and a gold chain, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The Red and the Black. The hero is a Radical of independent mind. He comes from the lower middle class, is poor, indifferent to his dress, often proudly contemptuous in his manner, and ambitious, not for himself but for humanity or, more accurately, for the small part of it he knows. He wants them all and particularly Esther Lyon to be better than they ...”

“... only a malign fate – the totalitarian grip of Russia – wrested them after the Second World War, as the ideologues of Central Europe, Kundera and others, have argued. The division of the continent has deeper roots, and goes back much further, than the pact at Yalta. In a well-received book, the American historian Larry Wolff charged travellers and ...”

“... laws, courts and union regulations that people obey. How can we do it? How do you get from World War Two to Maastricht and the EU?’ Europeans don’t understand that this is an astonishing historical precedent. In a recent essay you call for a ‘social democracy of fear’. But hasn’t the ‘war on terror’ of the ...”

“... to charge a number of Communists with conspiracy. A wave of propaganda convinced many middle-class Germans that the emergency decree was justified. During the blaze, the police found a young Dutchman called Marinus van der Lubbe in the building. He had firelighters in his possession and other suspicious material. By the time he was brought to trial ...”

“... In 2001, the New-York-based International Rescue Committee started providing estimates of war-related deaths since the conflict began in 1998: they rose from 1.7 million in 2001 to 5.4 million in January 2008. If correct, these figures account for about 8 per cent of the current population of the country. They were called into question in ...”

“... largest country by landmass, and has the ninth largest economy – who grew up not just working-class but poor. His biographer John French points out that Lula learned to read when he was ten, didn’t always have enough to eat, left school at twelve, and came from the impoverished, stigmatised north-east of the country, with the accent to prove it. ...”

“... reverse the priorities established by the international community as it emerged from World War Two, when the idea was that the economy and the world of finance should serve and not dominate humanity. The Philadelphia Declaration (which became an integral part of the constitution of the ILO) proclaims the right of all ‘to pursue both their material ...”

“... wouldn’t have missed it for anything,’ it will say to itself about a quarrel or a war, some episode of general misery. English consciousness admits this general truth with a smile and a shrug, while not taking it too seriously. It can live beside it and around it. But the Russian intelligent – still more the Russian poet – flings himself ...”