“... as a species of boys’ fiction. The book begins in Chicago, towards the end of the Second World War. Paulsen is five. His father went off to war the year his son was born and has never seen him. Paulsen and his mother live alone, and when the mother goes to work an old woman called Clara does the child-minding. This woman ...”

“... into a book, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order. ‘In the post-Cold War world,’ he wrote there, ‘the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political or economic. They are cultural.’ Refreshingly critical of ‘the West’s universalist pretensions’, Huntington admonished US policy-makers to give ...”

“... if vaguely with the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the ever emerging middle class, male dress has been relatively sober and static for two hundred years. What happened in the 20th century, Judith Watt suggests in her introduction to Fashion Writing, was that the whole subject of clothes came to be seen as feminine or effeminate. Hence ...”

“... Hamann gives us a taste of Klindworth’s opinions: ‘I believe that only a terrible world war can release the tension, and only the most awful misery can bring our people back to prudence and moderation, faith and moral aspiration.’ The defining moment in Winifred’s life occurred in July 1914, when, aged 17, she accompanied Karl Klindworth to ...”

“... unconditional submission – and your money’. Nor was the satire he directed at the English class system and religion, especially the established Church, or at contemporary attitudes to women’s rights, universally welcomed. Still, readers appreciated his evident benevolence, allied to a humour that recalled Fielding, Smollett and Sterne. The titles of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his early thirties, he had served in the Armed Forces during Italy’s participation in the Great War. Wounded once and decorated repeatedly, he had been promoted to lieutenant and then captain. At the war’s end he had married and started a family. By 1923, when Pound met him, he was managing the Palace Hotel, located ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... centre but was quickly banned by the authorities: it depicted the postcolonial black ruling class as swindlers in league with Western neo-imperialist masters, doing peasants and workers out of their land and rights. The theatre was burned down and Ngugi was imprisoned for a year without charge or trial, which convinced him he had been onto something by ...”

“... women, whose sex and apparent insignificance has rendered them invisible. During the Second World War it was felt necessary to run a propaganda campaign warning men that women could hear what they were saying. The ‘Keep mum, she’s not so dumb’ poster showed a blonde on a sofa with three men in uniform talking across her. A less famous but more subtle ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”