“... of 1977. We learn about the composer’s somewhat unbalanced parentage, his educated, middle-class engineer father (the inventor of a circus motor-car prophetically named ‘Le Tourbillon de la Mort’, which crashed in an early test in 1905 and killed its driver), and his Basque mother, the illegitimate daughter of a fisherwoman from Ciboure. Ravel ...”

“... earlier the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated. The world was gearing up for the Great War, but Blast was evidence that a major campaign was already underway, and it advertised its confrontational style with a puce-and-black colour scheme and parallel columns of hates and loves, ‘blasted’ and ‘blessed’. The bombastic birth of Vorticism ...”

“... Spanish; was a child of the European wars of religion; was exiled in middle age by a long civil war, and then forced to comprehend not only the execution of Charles I but also the abolition of monarchy; survived to see the restoration of kings, and indeed the royalist Cavendish family, to power; and died the year England seemed to be inexorably slipping ...”

“... ability to interpret the nature of that knowing to the reader. Henry James offers a master-class in point-of-view in his preface to the novel: I should have of course to suppose for my heroine dispositions originally promising, but above all I should have to invest her with perceptions easily and almost infinitely quickened. So handsomely fitted ...”

“... interpreting and enhancing daily life, the nation was rocked by rebellions and plunged into civil war for the sake of religion; a king was beheaded and a royal dynasty replaced. Even when the ideological and political monopoly of the state church weakened towards the end of the period, religion remained powerful enough to trigger waves of life-transforming ...”

“... history, from 1900 to 1903. For hundreds of years, the Pennant family used advantages of race and class to grow and consolidate their wealth and power. There is still a Baron Penrhyn, but Penrhyn Castle was transferred to the National Trust in 1951 in lieu of death duties and now receives more than a hundred thousand visitors a year. In 2011 the North Wales ...”

“... I am of that odious class of men called democrats,’ Wordsworth wrote to his friend William Mathews in 1794. Much the same can be said of Coleridge, on the evidence of his letters and publications of the mid-1790s. By the early decades of this century, British, French and American scholarship concurred in finding both poets to be, in the 1790s, republicans and advanced reformers, who then suffered disappointment in the course of the French Revolution and, in different ways and at different times, changed their minds ...”

“... to my own surprise (and very much to the surprise of my college) had just scraped into the first class. So instead of being thrust out into the world as I had expected I was offered the chance of putting Life off a little longer by staying on, as I thought vaguely ‘to do research’, though into what I had no idea. In quest of a supervisor and also a ...”

“... to which Ken Tynan bore a symbolic relation was the quarter-century following the Second World War, during which the generation of grammar-school children to whom the Education Act of 1944 opened Britain’s older universities created a new society open to their talents. Tynan was the first, and flamboyantly the foremost, of their number. In fact, his ...”

“... The persistent stagflation of the Seventies reversed the favourable terms of the post-war expansion of welfare states. Instead of growing economies and dampened inflation, we have grown to live with slowing economies and heightened inflation. And although during the Eighties we have largely tamed inflation, citizens have almost come to expect ...”

“... decision have been the subject of endless speculation. Was Vittorio Emmanuele afraid of civil war? Did he doubt the loyalty of his troops? Had he been swayed by the supposed Fascist sympathies of his mother, Queen Margherita? Or was it just that, like everyone else, he had simply read the morning papers?The revocation of martial law was announced to the ...”

“... laissez-faire at home with bellicose intervention abroad, vigorously supporting the Crimean War in 1854. This led to a final break with Cobden and Bright, who opposed all such military adventurism and so came in for fierce criticism from the paper. ‘I never see the Economist,’ Cobden answered when asked what he thought of its latest editorial ...”

“... the kinds of book of which you could ask: ‘What are your favourite tracks?’ The Corrections’ war of attrition between Caroline and Gary Lambert is a breathtakingly good sequence – but Gary remains the most underpowered character in the novel. This grumble doesn’t obtain here. Tonally more even, but also more subdued than The Corrections, Freedom is ...”

“... of Kafka, too, with the caption: ‘The disease was life itself.’ He carried a towel with him to class because he sweated too much (the same reason he wore the bandana as an adult), and he sometimes stayed home because of anxiety attacks. An early crush on a local girl called Susie Perkins resulted in a broken hand, from punching a refrigerator at a ...”

“... tape recorders. It’s not a cohort defined by age because the postwar students included World War Two veterans born in the 1920s as well as school-leavers born in the 1930s. Nor is it a social group whose exact location and definition a sociologist could map. The subject of Zubok’s book is a group of people with a shared worldview, shared assumptions ...”