“... father met his end; the drawn-out death of his young daughter; the loss of a son to the Civil War; the departure of his other son – from the village, from the mountains, from Spain – in search of a modern, middle-class life in the new Europe. This son (whose name is also Andrés, as if ironically to emphasise the ...”

“... similar document. His 5000-word ‘Democracy in the Middle East’ was written at the US Army War College. Both essays are filled with the kind of breezy generalisations that can still be heard over the clink of whisky glasses in army officers’ mess rooms in the developing world. ‘Our people are mostly uneducated and our politicians not so ...”

“... on the left. At the time of publication, France had entered the fourth year of an undeclared war against nationalist insurgents in Algeria; it had lost its imperial foothold in Indochina in 1954 and was now determined to hang on to its possessions in Africa. Most French critics of colonial rule focused on land expropriation, the exploitation of ...”

“... in their ‘Labourer’ trilogy (1911-19), painted a dark picture of the way a rapacious ruling class had deployed the supposed findings of political economy to legitimate the various schemes of expropriation and exploitation that brought untold suffering to the poor.Another historical line of attack was taken by R.H. Tawney, whose Religion and the Rise of ...”

“... the surrounding hills. Ali’s family was among them. His father opened a smoke shop in a working-class neighbourhood, and Ali attended one of the newly built schools. These were like shrines to Hafez: there were posters of the president on the walls and the pupils memorised his speeches. ‘Our leader for ever: Hafez al-Assad,’ Ali and his classmates ...”

“... these people with words and will not let them breathe. The self-depreciating asides (on a middle-class writer’s privilege and complicity) are only a little dated and anyway in line with expectations of this form of pastoral, but they sink the subject in a different way. So does a self-conscious literary motif which crops up in the dedicatory ...”

“... to a reporter while on his way to deliver the speech; John Profumo in 1963 as secretary for war for lying about his affair with Christine Keeler; and Amber Rudd as home secretary in 2018 during the Windrush scandal for claiming to be ignorant of the government’s immigration targets, although the figures had been sent to her. In Dalton’s case, it was ...”

“... created. There are wooden clogs under the stairs that are older than Belgium. My family is working-class and post-industrial: Walloon first, European second and Belgian third. Their Belgitude, which they celebrate when the ‘diables rouges’ are playing in the World Cup and disdain for royal weddings or the king’s Christmas message, is part of a modular ...”

“... had been two branches of the Peels in Halifax, both with mills, and that at the time of the Boer War the run on cloth for uniforms had tempted their branch of the family, her grandfather possibly, to invest in new machinery. With the end of the war came a slump and for them bankruptcy, while the other, less enterprising ...”

“... majority of those remaining are probably not of Lithuanian origin anyway and came after the war.) Yiddish – along with Polish – had been the language of Vilnius and Kaunas; it is heard no more. Nothing remains of Heshel’s synagogue, nor of his father-in-law Rabbi Zvi Oppenheim’s in Kelme. (There were two thousand Jews in Kelme in 1941; there is ...”

“... Early in 1947 Simone de Beauvoir made her first trip to the United Sates. The Cold War was beginning and, like Sartre, Camus and the rest of their circle, she was searching for a third-camp alternative to Stalinism and American imperialism. Beauvoir was drawn to the United States for other reasons, anticipating, as she put it at the beginning of America Day by Day, the chronicle of the journey that she published the year after she returned to France, ‘a world so full, so rich, and so unexpected that I’ll have the extraordinary adventure of becoming a different me ...”

“... of goods out of Britain was governed by the royal prerogative and the common law. The Second World War made a more coherent framework essential and the emergency powers in this statute provided it. That they were then considered to be of a temporary nature was made clear by section 9(3), which provided that the Act was to ‘continue in force until such date ...”

“... in which the mind had repudiated its rights, leaving matter and the senses to take over. In middle-class society, men thought having a mistress just as much a fashionable necessity as ‘taking the waters, sea-bathing, and going to first nights’; while kept women, like ‘female minotaurs’, were ‘devouring’ France’s young men. There was also the ...”

“... least not for a long time.’ Auerbach’s great book Mimesis was written in Istanbul during World War Two, published in German in 1946, and in English in 1953; there was an anniversary edition of the translation in 2003, with an introduction by Edward Said. Mimesis is an indispensable point of reference for anyone interested in comparative literature, close ...”

“... one had to. We were in the church where Martin Luther King declared his opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967. We were honouring the life of America’s leading free jazz musician in a dramatic week for freedom in America. The Supreme Court had ruled five to four in favour of gay marriage; at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Obama ...”