“... 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 ...”

“... France as a free country.’ By the end of the Reign of Terror in 1793-94 and two decades of war with other great powers, the loss of life had turned out to be much greater than Dorset thought. Yet the awesomeness of 1789 as a model of human emancipation inspired revolutionaries of various kinds – liberal, socialist, anticolonialist – worldwide until ...”

“... Khartoum, is being destroyed in a fight to the death between two venal, brutal generals. This is a war of choice; allowing it to happen was a failure of international diplomacy. But if we look at the city’s 200-year history, the fighting shouldn’t be a surprise. Khartoum was founded on a command post built for the purposes of imperial robbery – and every ...”

“... Benn returned the feeling. Having learned to fly himself in the RAF towards the end of the war, he had glimpsed the great pyramid of repute which mounted from humble students like himself towards the shadowy apex where the mighty test pilots belonged, men like Trubshaw and his military counterparts Roly Beamont and Eric Brown, men who were stuffed with ...”

“... it would no longer be necessary to supply it with faulty intelligence about Iraq, nor would the war between the two states be allowed to go on as it has for the last eight years. Since Saudi Arabia had already been dragged into these schemes, one could foresee Israeli and US planners delighting in a forecast that would include bilateral negotiations between ...”

“... of a certain noblesse oblige. They probably believed that sentiment had its origins in an upper-class conviction that ratings were naturally as well as institutionally and socially inferior to officers, a conviction they had long since rejected. They were, however, quite clear about the advantages of rank, and if for some it had entailed notions of ...”

“... insist there should be no second-best solutions for countries just because they are poor and war-torn. Too often, the same coterie of international civil servants decamps from contracts in Kosovo to East Timor to Liberia, bringing with them the same working culture and the same formula for state-building. State-builders ignore vernacular politics, to the ...”

“... of Nations’ was noted in 1870 – the sight of two country lovers during the Franco-Prussian war – but not given poetic form until 1914. Such memories, like the poetic spark that’s ‘frozen and delayed’, are the source and resource of the great late poetry. It is a poetry of dispersed memories, not of shaping autobiography, haunted by the lives of ...”

“... the trappings of the culture they most strongly identified with, the Scottish Lowland upper middle class to which their mother belonged: armies of servants, big houses and neo-aristocratic leisure pursuits. My father was born in Madras (now Chennai) in 1936. Apart from a brief visit when he was six months old he first saw Britain aged nine, at the end of the ...”

“... Her most recent novel, Gier (published in English as Greed), concerns a man not dissimilar in class and background to Josef Fritzl. Kurt Janisch is a country policeman who kills a 15-year-old girl by pressing on her carotid artery while she is giving him a blowjob in the back of his patrol car, and then dumps her body in the local lake. The considerable ...”

“... of the poet, the poetry was usually treated as quite impersonal. It had come, in the post-war years, under heavy academic protection: this was a time when potent professors wanted to exclude biography from the institutional study of literature. Eliot’s own doctrine of poetic impersonality had contributed to the formation of this austere ...”

“... hidden it deep beneath princess-and-pea layers of material: Florence after the Second World War (Innocence), Moscow just before the First (The Beginning of Spring), Cambridge at around the same period (The Gate of Angels), pre-Napoleonic Saxony (The Blue Flower). One imagines the author building up the research, bit by bit, joining it from many ...”

“... Douglas-ScottWe​ learned soon after his victory that the new prime minister has convened a ‘war cabinet’ to prepare for Brexit. Yet the only war is the one Britain has declared on itself. Let us be clear what a no deal Brexit is likely to involve: food shortages; immobile freight traffic at Dover; medicine shortages ...”