“... fiction: end-time resource wars on a dying planet. The Uninhabitable Earth is an example of the class of writing the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton has described as ‘ecological information data dump’: quantities of frightening and confusing information, mostly out of date by the time of publication, ‘shaking your lapels while yelling disturbing ...”

“... of Northern Ireland, the part of the province that voted Leave. Banners commemorated First World War battles and the UVF, which was formed in 1912 to resist Home Rule. One had the slogan ‘prepared for peace, ready for war’, the words of a mural in an area of Belfast dominated by the reincarnated UVF during the ...”

“... a stop to this; and neither could their parents or anybody else. This was in the solidly middle-class south County Dublin suburbs in the early 1960s, now regarded as the dawn of a less insular Ireland – a time and a place of which one might have expected better. Hamilton is too resourceful and alert a writer to make his memoir yet one more book about a ...”

“... sector to supplement their incomes, but the rewards are disappointing. A veteran of the Iran-Iraq War who drove me into town one evening described the situation in his village: ‘My mother is fine because she is stingy and things are still cheap there, but what do I get by moving to the city? I fought at the front for six years, but now there are no houses ...”

“... analysis, rather than a centrifugal one that might splatter their content onto the wider world of class, gender or ethnic particularism. It helps that the gamer’s proxy is always on a quest – for money, gold, any token that may have valuta if not intrinsic value. The numbers it’s necessary to lay waste to en route to these trinkets inflate according to ...”

“... or time’. He finds it strangely bracing to eat in a restaurant built over a Civil War mass grave, ‘as if the dead boys dancing with death had built it just for him 135 years later in a flush Vicksburg, very wide and rolling’. He hates nature, ‘wishing more of it was a rug and smelled like new cars’. Most of all, he’s profoundly ...”

“... imposed way of behaviour,’ their grandson Rhodri recalled. ‘“We’re both very nice middle-class artists, and I’m a vicar.” It was impossible to be relaxed about them, they weren’t normal, they wouldn’t allow themselves to be relaxed. So there were these huge silences . . . But small talk was vulgar. And a lot of life is vulgar.’ Parish ...”

“... turbines, have fled Baghdad for fear of being kidnapped. The walls of al-Iskan, the lower-middle-class district where Musak lives, are covered in slogans supporting the resistance. Musak explained: ‘A few weeks ago a man, nobody knows who, shot at a helicopter with his Kalashnikov. The helicopter fired two rockets in return. They hit the tent where a ...”

“... Office rated it as a tropical posting and, until the advent of air-conditioning, the political class had evacuated the former swamp between June and September. In her readable, if modular, account of how air-conditioning in the United States evolved from a novelty to a luxury, to a necessity, to a right, Marsha Ackermann devotes a chapter to cooling creep ...”

“... and anti-nuclear, and he hoped to draw attention to Wilson’s support for America’s war in Vietnam. He didn’t expect to win the seat, but if he could get a thousand votes from Labour, Hull North might return to the Tories, precipitating a general election. Gott was confident that Labour would win that election, but believed that afterwards the ...”

“... in Vienna jumped from fewer than four thousand in 1848 to 175,000 on the eve of the First World War. It’s important not to underestimate the impact of small elites of the wealthy and educated – of the 405 Jewish families in early 19th-century Berlin, say. Pre-democratic liberal societies were constructed for the benefit of such groups. Thus the Italian ...”

“... annihilation’ practised by the author’s mother – could stand as a vindication of upper-class belief in character. The author has not moved far from her family, geographically or socially, but she has led an independent life. This family is one of maids and mansions, and of neighbours who, when quizzed abroad about their occupation, explain: Moi, je ...”

“... having graduated from a number of Boston’s finest mental establishments and finally, with the class of 1973, becoming an alumna of McLean Hospital, alma mater of Lowell and Plath. Wherever she went there were flings and affairs, behaviour expected of course from male poets on the circuit, but scandalous when the poet was a woman. ‘Wow! I’ve kissed ...”

“... Ethiopian. Alan McClaurin looks back at himself as a young man in flight, first, from the Vietnam War and the draft, and then later, in 1971, when, ‘dreaming of solitude and inviting my soul’, he returns to the country where he grew up. Not the least of Douglas’s successes is the way she casts at least provisional doubt on both the soul and the judgment ...”

“... by the system of democratic pluralism. Shafarevich’s great concern is that these Cold War clichés have penetrated modern Russian culture. Under their influence, he contends, Russia’s contemporary poets and balladeers preach the message that the Russian people are ‘beasts with human faces’ and that ‘it is impossible to live honourably ...”