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“... one seems to have contemplated the problems of the future. Can we really maintain for good a first-class base at the other end of the world? And if we can do this, is it worth doing? As the questions pile one on another, the wisest course is to cease these speculations and leave events to decide the future fate of the Falkland Islands. This is what I intend to ...”

“... commonly described as chronicling the decline of a landowning family – as it were, a sequel to War and Peace; and it has been suggested that it draws on Saltykov’s first-hand experience of that milieu, which would go a long way to explain his gloomy outlook: but to see it as social history or even as realistic novel is to miss the point. It’s certainly ...”

“... German people have still not faced up to the full truth: ‘in spite of everything, the war is still unexplained’). Her capacity to register the felt experience transcends the programmatic bent of her fiction. Which is exactly what you can’t say about Heinrich Böll. His journalistic sense of public life has always threatened to circumscribe his ...”

“... classes from which they come’. Cukor is arguing with Veblen’s demeaning Theory of the Leisure Class. He is inviting us to an altogether more elevating conversation between C. K. Dexter Haven, Tracy Lord, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (There is, as Cavell nicely describes it, a raging ‘thirst for talk’ in all these films.) We are hearing about the ...”

“... that was revealed in the Brexit vote has been given the chance to deepen while the political class has been stuck trying to deliver on the change the Brexit vote called for. The government may be anticipating some gratitude if and when it fulfils the mission the electorate set for it. The electorate may have other ideas. Perhaps an entire political order ...”

“... middling ministers. There has been a substantial increase in the number of female MPs. Since the war there has always been a handful of formidable female MPs – Barbara Castle, Bessie Braddock, Margaret Thatcher, Gwyneth Dunwoody – but never enough to change the boys’ club culture. It was not until the Blair revolution of 1997, which saw the election of ...”

“... in murder’.Unlike in other parts of West Africa, frustration with the political class is tempered by a belief in due process. The coup was met with greater enthusiasm in Mali, which borders Burkina to the north. Mali has been run by a military junta since a coup in August 2020. Sanctions, including border closures, were brought against it ...”

“... Her emphasis is on Franklin as a scientist, very conscious of her professionalism, her social class, her Jewishness and her abilities. For Maddox’s Franklin there was no small talk, no beating about the bush: she was demanding, belligerent, aloof, at times curt, not an easy person to work with, either at King’s (1951-53) or at Birkbeck (1953-58). But ...”

“... They were the containers in which millions of traps were shipped from the Black Country. Did World War Two bring a slump in trapmaking? Not in Australia, where a Wednesfield subsidiary toiled to produce the seven million traps needed to provide skins for army slouch hats and flying-suit linings. In 1953 the spread of myxomatosis failed to spread ‘misery and ...”

“... Two of Lahiri’s stories show what’s missing. Both are set in Calcutta, both in lower-middle-class blocks of flats where only a few residents have telephones or running water, but everyone knows everyone else and interferes in their lives, mostly with the very best intentions. In spite of the current wave of Indian fiction in English, this particular ...”

“... But the recollections of people who came into the City before or not long after the Second World War leave a consistent impression of a system which worked rather well. It really did seem (or so I’ve been told by people who remember it) like a club – for men only, needless to say. The club’s veteran members were assumed to know what they needed to know ...”

“... descend to a maximum of about fifty metres, where the air pressure is six atmospheres, and world-class free divers go down to about a hundred metres, where the pressure is ten atmospheres – more than enough to tell the human body that it doesn’t want to be there. Normally functioning submarines, meaning subs not designed for the special purpose of ...”

“... city that overcame the challenges of Napoleon’s blockades to the imperial capital that made war on the Boers. Like White’s previous survey, London in the 20th Century (2001), this book is at times very funny. He quotes a letter in which Dickens describes the parochial fire engine that put out a small blaze at the offices, just off the Strand, of his ...”

“... TV, all the Arabian channels you can stare at, Coronation Street dubbed into Arabic – class!), so being the experienced guys we are we sat and waited till it was over. On leaving the TV room I saw why the Yanks will never win a war. They were running all over the place in what can only be described as a mass ...”

“... being seized by the settlers, leading to a decade-long period of violence known as the Black War. The Aborigines formed raiding parties who lit decoy fires, stole from food-stores, and occasionally attacked bystanders with their spears. The colonists campaigned loudly for action to be taken. In 1830 the infamous Black Line was thought up by George ...”