“... and anti-Burkeans are far less predictable in ideological terms. At the height of the Cold War, Burke, for instance, proved a combined fountainhead and figurehead for extreme right-wing American ideologues. He was ‘for’ the spirit of ’76 (in actual fact, he was not, but the Cold War did not offer nice ...”

“... South Africa, a dominion of the British Empire, occupied South-West Africa during the First World War: affinities between European colonial nations trumped wartime animosity. Europeans farmed the fertile areas, while the Indigenous peoples were confined to Bantustans in areas affected by drought. This structure of land ownership remained in place after ...”

“... mobile reader will identify with it. I suppose, too, that it is just possible there are upper-class readers so articulate and cocooned that they find Harrison’s background exotic in a way comparable to Lowell’s. I doubt it, though. In any case, shouldn’t both hypothetical readers reject that padding ‘all’, even while they reluctantly accept the ...”

“... in which he sings, because ticket prices don’t cover the costs of staging an opera with a world-class cast. State subsidy of opera is not simply there to pay for one of those things that individuals prefer not to pay for. It is there to provide for individual preferences in a world in which such preferences no longer directly control the finances of ...”

“... spillage of refugees and militias across the border with Liberia (the site of a ruinous, complex war) and a largely homespun insurgency which turned into another, very Kaplanesque war after his departure. In ‘The Coming Anarchy’, Sierra Leone was the paradigm of a Post-Modern badlands, ‘a microcosm of what is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”