“... father and mother worked their way up in the world ‘into what might be called the lower middle class’ by sheer hard work and resolved at whatever cost to themselves to provide their children with a decent education. Alexander was accordingly put into the kindergarten department of a public school (Scottish sense), where he received rapid preferment ...”

“... in the wilderness came up dry. So did surveys conducted elsewhere in the Sinai. After the 1967 war, when Israeli archeologists gained access to the West Bank, the heartland of ancient Israelite culture, they expected to find the rich cities of the Book of Joshua. But instead they found evidence only of a society impoverished by centuries of Egyptian ...”

“... see it as fundamentally unjust. The argument that some who play the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, ‘Yes, well, that’s only 2 per cent,’ or, as people get richer, 5 per cent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax. I mean, that’s the morality of the Holocaust. ‘Well, it’s only a small ...”

“... political radicals. In 1962 he joined Ruskin College (in but not of Oxford), a centre for working-class and trade-union education. There, he began increasingly to use primary sources in his teaching: accessing history via secondary literature, he thought, often crushed students’ confidence in their own abilities; examining the original documents was far ...”

“... remote, panoptic eyeIs tracking us and quietly waiting forThe gesture that could culminate in war;You scratch your nose, I finish my ice-creamAnd screw the silver paper in the sand.Your milky skin is tanning like a dream.That ultra-violet shadow is my hand.The camera rolls on, its frozen lensPicks out the agriculture of the FensThen swaps the filters for ...”

“... for Bleuler it was a group. How come, at exactly the same time, but separated by an ocean and a war, we get two very similar, absolutely new childhood disorders? Not so surprising. Asperger, a generation younger than Kanner, had trained under August Homburger, the author of one of Kanner’s main German textbooks, who wrote about childhood schizophrenia and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”