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“... Dissolution (2003) was a bestseller and a sequel was commissioned. He completed his Spanish Civil War novel, Winter in Madrid (2006), anyway. Since then he has published another modern thriller, Dominion (2012), which imagines Britain under Nazi occupation, and six further books set in Tudor England, progressing from publishing success to phenomenon. He has ...”

“... in a Europe roiled by social upheaval, economic chaos and political intrigue after the First World War. Born in 1889 to an affluent Jewish family in the Bohemian town of Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary), Serner moved in 1909 to Vienna to study law, but the illicit was his true métier. He changed his name, quit school, converted to Catholicism and moved to ...”

“... The Romans had always been free with their citizenship, and the backgrounds of the imperial ruling class grew more diverse as wealthy and influential families in the provinces began to seek empire-wide roles a generation or two after their enfranchisement. We see this most clearly in the spread of senatorial status: first to the Italian municipalities, then to ...”

“... for consorting with ‘bourgeois’ groups and ‘striving for race unity’ instead of ‘class unity’. (His childhood friend in Trinidad C.L.R. James, who had given Nkrumah a letter of introduction to Padmore, was then at work on The Black Jacobins.) A version of socialist internationalism emerged from the conference, with Soviet influence in ...”

“... one of ‘a few exceptional statesmen’ who saved Hungary after the disaster of the First World War, and his authoritarian rule has become an important prototype for Orbán. His version of the period after the German invasion is most fully expressed by the Budapest Museum of Terror, founded in 2002, which blames the atrocities of the Nazi and communist ...”

“... how best to behave intensified in the ‘other people’s houses’ where she spent the war. On hearing that her parents would soon be in England, she felt a ‘terrific physical relief’, observing that, suddenly, her body was ‘sensuously at ease’. But her foster mother expected visual evidence that she was ‘pleased’ and, since ‘it would ...”

“... the eponymous heroine of Aristophanes’ play about a sex strike to stop the Peloponnesian War, expresses sympathy for the unmarried ‘maidens’ whom nobody will ‘wed’ – where, in the Greek, she uses very neutral, not markedly old-fashioned terms for girls (kore) and marriage (gemai). A city official, in the same play, complains at the ...”

“... family were skilled craftsmen, who worked primarily cutting and carving gravestones. They did high-class, ornate work and had a good reputation; some of the early 20th-century memorials at Kilbegley graveyard in nearby County Roscommon are signed by the Beegan stonemasons. There is a large Celtic cross carved by them as a memorial to the 4th earl of ...”

“... Suchard and Daniel Peter, the inventor of milk chocolate. Just before the end of the First World War, Cadbury and Fry undertook a defensive merger to protect themselves against takeover by Nestlé. It turned out Fry was worth much less than Cadbury; Cadbury accordingly became the dominant partner. The merger was a takeover in all but name.One of​ the ...”

“... obeyed and decisions taken by the president and the joint chiefs of staff in the darkened war room.Stanley Kubrick​ was born in the Bronx in 1928, the son of a successful neighbourhood doctor. Jack Kubrick and his wife, Gertrude, were literate secular Jews; there were plenty of books around the house, and Jack owned a 16 mm camera suitable for home ...”

“... which has led large parts of Africa towards single-party rule, bitter tribal division and civil war. It is also quite peculiarly inappropriate to South Africa, for it has already been agreed that there will, in effect, be no ‘great day’ on which power is ‘transferred’. Instead, there will be a period of power-sharing in which the ANC will sit in a ...”

“... glossed the Jamesian school as ‘pretentious escapist crap for the well-heeled middle-class market’. A conventional put-down by a man distancing himself, quite reasonably, from his disadvantaged background as an old Etonian with a family pile in darkest Kent. The real Ackroyd, Peter, it is felt, has also peaked at the right time, in cabbing ...”

“... about giants brought him to think happily about his own childhood. It often does. The comic war in Pantagruel is set in Utopia – Rabelais knew his Thomas More and borrowed from him both the thirsty Dipsodes and the obscure Amaurotes. In Gargantua he fits the rivalries between France and the Holy Roman Empire into the tiny world of castle, wood and ...”

“... him as ‘a good painter, arguably the nearest to a great one to have emerged in Britain since the war’. And greatness is, Bacon says, the only thing worth attempting: ‘You see art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself ... what is fascinating now is that it is going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must ...”

“... Where sociologists had spent much of the 20th century trying to understand poverty and shifting class stratifications across the spectrum, Piketty focused on a small group of super-rich individuals, and posed a deceptively simple empirical question: where had they got all their money from? That so much of it turned out to be ‘unearned’ (either inherited ...”