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“... papers’. True, Pasternak had written some boilerplate patriotic verse during the Second World War, ‘civic poetry’ that encouraged some party hacks in the belief that he had finally found ‘the correct path’. And the translations of Georgian poets were known to have pleased the Boss. But in the main, where others, fatally, confronted argument with ...”

“... southern Arabia and southern Sudan. ‘Air control’ was used in India in 1942, and after the war in Malaya (where 4000 tons of bombs were dropped in 1952) and in Kenya between 1952 and 1956. During that decade it was still being used in southern Arabia, ‘where, among others, the Hujeili, Mansuri, Ayehlia, Bal Harith and Quteibi were set on’. If a ...”

“... done with their lives. Hence the importance of ‘philanthropy’ for the financial billionaire class. Their work has no meaning; meaning has to be found in what they subsequently do with the money they have made. For many of them, the most valuable single thing they can do with their riches is establish a reputation outside the world of finance which ...”

“... captured. Nehru was a generation younger; of handsome appearance; came from a much higher social class; had an elite education in the West; lacked religious beliefs; enjoyed many an affair. So much is well known. Politically more relevant was the peculiar nature of his relationship to Gandhi. Inducted into the national movement by his wealthy father, a ...”

“... school of leftism, who see in Thatcherism the will to make a decisive break with a post-war consensus. Where she finds inspiration in Victorian capitalism, and in the edifice of private charity which emerged in the latter half of the 19th century, his is found in the English revolution – in particular, the passions of the Levellers, who, though ...”

“... she divides into three: first, his embattled life in literary England during and after the Great War, a complicated and argumentative parade of Middleton Murrys and Mansfields and Morrells at cross purposes; then the couple of years spent in Italy, mostly in Florence, from 1919, and the seriously rum company he kept there; and finally, after much ...”

“... surroundings’. Enough splashing around with the small fry – suddenly he’s of the land-owning class again, arranging the world for his pleasure, picking and choosing among its creatures. You could quite forget that there are otters in the book, because none is mentioned until we’ve had 74 pages of Camusfeàrna’s river and hues, moods and storms. There ...”

“... that Barcelona has fallen at last – that the Republican cause is in effect defeated, and world war therefore now unavoidable.It is difficult to gauge from the rest of the Life whether the biographer really intended the full force of this boat-burning climax, which does tend to make of Auden and Isherwood not merely deserters but conscious ...”

“... Cameroon, where Mbembe was born, remained a German protectorate until the end of the First World War. Eugenics research programmes in African colonies formed the basis for Nazi race science (skulls from Namibia and Tanzania ended up in the collection of German museums and universities).Mbembe’s historicisation of the Holocaust drew unwanted attention to ...”

“... plotting (he tried to get accepted to do an anthropology postgraduate degree at Chicago after the war on the subject of universal story patterns). Rhetorically, Vonnegut’s fictional technique consists of simple assertions about the important elements and actions in whatever world he happens to be describing. The other kind of procedure, in which these ...”

“... poverty and brutality that underpinned it. His writings were republished at the height of the Cold War by Moscow’s Foreign Languages Press: the cover features a cop with a truncheon beneath an intimidating canyon of skyscrapers.But all this is a sideshow to the main event: Cohen’s account of the ways in which the Soviet Union modelled itself after a ...”

“... time, Edwin Montagu, passionately opposed the declaration and detested Zionism. After the Great War, the British saddled themselves with responsibility for Mandatory Palestine, which proved one of the unhappier episodes in the decline and fall of the British Empire. In 1922, when Churchill was colonial secretary for a short but eventful spell, he unified ...”

“... stopped reading the teleprompter to ‘speak from the heart’: ‘To the next generation, your war is here, you don’t have to go searching for it. Your people are afraid … Who among you will love something more than you love yourself? Who among you are going to step up and take the fight to the enemy, because it’s here? The only way we survive this ...”

“... passion.Kracauer and Adorno were introduced by a mutual friend towards the end of the First World War and soon began spending Saturday afternoons together reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Perhaps theirs isn’t the only romance to have blossomed over the transcendental deduction of the categories of understanding. ‘I am not exaggerating when I say ...”

“... medal for advancing under fire after having his arm shattered by a bullet. In the First World War he won another medal for his efforts ‘to re-establish order in the troops’ – a euphemism, probably, for shooting his own men. He may or may not have participated in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s freebooting occupation of Fiume in 1919, in which the poet and ...”