“... world, too, even if her characters were stuck in middle America, usually with disappointed middle-class lives, underwhelming husbands and dysfunctional relationships with their mothers. None of that mattered – because they were witty, always having conversations I wished I was part of. But, as with rewatching a show that seemed brilliant at the time, when ...”

“... also egalitarian, enabling anyone with a good eye and time on their hands to contribute. An elite class of volunteers would arrange completed slips into bundles for pre-sorting (both by chronology and into senses of meaning), before Murray’s Scriptorium staff embarked on the business of turning slip bundles into referenced definitions.Ogilvie herself ...”

“... are by no means so immediate or so existential. Meanwhile, the character of the oppositions at war here changes dramatically as one moves from one level or context to another: the natural law universalism of Habermas and his followers, which can embody an Enlightenment stance against superstition and tyranny, suddenly looks rather different when it is ...”

“... I made a long-contemplated trip to France and Belgium to see the cemeteries of the First World War. My quest, though transatlantic, was a modest, conventional and somewhat anorakish one: I hoped to locate the grave of my great-uncle, Rifleman Lewis Newton Braddock, 1st/17th (County of London) Battalion (Poplar and Stepney Rifles), the London Regiment, who ...”

“... response to forced movement on the Continent itself, from the 1880s to the end of the Second World War, might fairly be seen as impressive. So might the absorption of refugees during the Cold War: far fewer, of course, and mostly from South-East Asia, in keeping with Cold ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”