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“... three generations, from the high-water mark of the Victorian age to the eve of the Second World War, the Stracheys were prominent in English life. Noted for their intellect and their boisterousness in argument, and characterised, in most cases, by long limbs and large spectacles, they struck Leonard Woolf as ‘much the most remarkable family I have ever ...”

“... the right. Fleet Street was once a place of genuine human interest. Today, hatred rules. A culture war is taking place in the minds of these editors, not a battle against the bumptious and the piss-taking or even against a few poofs drinking wine, but against an imagined horde of terrorists aiming to plunge your church into darkness or blow up your Tube ...”

“... cost. During the late Sixties, his short stories and novels addressed the aftermath of the 1967 war, sympathetically in the case of an emergent Palestinian resistance, critically in the case of the Egyptian military intervention in Yemen. Mahfouz was the most celebrated writer and cultural figure to greet the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979, and ...”

“... of the present. By contrast, the ancient peoples of Australia possessed no capacity for war and were denied the capacity to make treaties; the land they occupied was defined in law as terra nullius and, even after the recent judgment reversing that rule, they must found their claims in the law of nature, rather than of nations (or history). This ...”

“... of men whose comradeship had been forged by the Long March, by Japanese aggression and by civil war. They had made a revolution and then boldly undertaken to remake a society of 600 million people. Their instrument of rule and regeneration was arguably the world’s most efficient and dynamic Communist Party. Within months, this image of peace and harmony ...”

“... of the family over Ludwig’s determination, immediately upon his return home at the end of World War One, to rid himself unconditionally of his whole fortune; and of her own dismay at his decision to become a country schoolteacher. She protested to him that his teaching in an elementary school would be like ‘using a precision instrument to open ...”

“... L’Age d’Or (1930), strains of Tristan accompany the very public copulation of a middle-class couple, delighting in having murdered their children. It is not always easy to gauge the sincerity, or specificity, of Wagnerian allusions, but the delicious Wagnerian puns and echoes in Finnegans Wake – Tristy (Tristan), Isolade (Isolde), ‘mudheeldy ...”

“... book in which T.E. Lawrence described his campaign in the Arabian desert during the First World War as an attempt to give the Arabs the foundations on which to build ‘the dream palace of their national thoughts’. Lawrence, however, dwelt only on the fringe of modern Arab history, and the task that Ajami has set himself is to tell that history from the ...”

“... unpleasant deaths, or maybe it was just another sea story told to new guys. Katchke was a high-class tech who knew about radar and advanced electronics; he even did some soldering now and then. I belonged to a lower caste: I swapped black boxes, ran testing protocols and checked the tyre pressure on the weapon carriers and wheeled them around on the ...”

“... town: grown men in tubs like cocoons, like giant turds; the ferocious previews of the First World War as international guests squabble round the tables in the hotel restaurants. ‘From the recesses of his stomach, as though from a box, he hears again a child’s or woman’s scream.’ Hold on tight, please, to that scream. Before the spa-town episode, we ...”

“... had been ruled by half a dozen armed gangs who took what, and whom, they wanted. Fifteen years of war had destroyed the economy and the infrastructure, armed the population with modern weapons, brutalised tens of thousands and displaced millions. For the people of Kandahar the woman’s abduction and gang-rape were nothing out of the way. But the reaction ...”

“... as female equality in recent times was prefigured on the popular screen before the end of World War Two. If she had followed up on some of the implications of this suggestion, she would have written an important book. Alas, she was talking too fast to hear herself think. Even so, Fast-Talking Dames could be the start of something big. If her judgment had ...”

“... give the date, but that’s when it was) and working for the Red Cross during the First World War. And he went regularly to Capri, where he was steadily building his sprawling dream house. The Story of San Michele is made up of 30-odd more or less free-standing chapters, though these loosely connected scenes from Munthe’s life are framed by an account ...”

“... questions as she tried to make sense of revolution in St Petersburg, as she fled through the Civil War, as she crossed the Black Sea along with other refugees to start a new life in a place which would in turn be engulfed by fascism and war. By the time she left Russia she was one of its most famous journalists and ...”

“... that the ten-inch sculpture formed the basis of all her work.’ From 1931 until the outbreak of war, Hampstead was the home of an emerging progressivism in art – not quite radical, a little domestic in fact, and also in thrall to the bolder experiments taking place in Paris and Berlin. Yet as a stream of European artists and architects arrived in ...”