“... he once painted a brilliant series – In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works from the Great War of the Californias – in which the cultural clashes between San Francisco and LA were depicted as a multi-ethnic battle, complete with fast-food sponsors and gang colours carried by the armed factions. Another series, Incarcerated: Visions of California in ...”

“... is writing his potboiler in a style of coarse assurance: Rogue Eagle Rising, about a war between Europe and the United States, has the functional, stripped-to-the-bone characters and dialogue, fast pace, changing locations, violent action, secrets and revelations, and the constant close proximity of death that he thinks the market requires, and ...”

“... so that advanced people could come here for courses’. As a result of Italy’s declaration of war on Britain in June 1940, refugee Italian scholars were caught in the same net. The ancient historian Arnaldo Momigliano and his family had managed to escape to Britain in March 1939 thanks to some prompt and admirably unbureaucratic assistance from the ...”

“... 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 ...”