“... possibility of an American revolution in the British Caribbean seemed so unlikely at the time. A war of attrition of the sort that delivered independence for the thirteen colonies would be impossible in a situation where the slave population outnumbered the settlers by between eight and twelve to one. Historically, the British in the West Indies relied on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of capital to eliminate all competition.Born in 1942, Manchette grew up during France’s colonial war against Algeria and joined the Communist Party as a teenager. His youthful activism prompted him to attempt a politicisation of the noir, which he claimed had the potential to be ‘the great moral literature of our time. Indeed … it is the most suitable ...”

“... a speech in Birmingham claiming that when he was at school ‘more than half the children in my class never had any boots or shoes to their feet.’ He did not mind leaving the impression that he himself had been in the unshod or clogged half, if half it was. We know for a fact that he was much fussed-over as a lad, and that his school was by no means of ...”

“... on leave in December, and they were married by special licence on Christmas Eve. During the war Agatha worked first as a VAD, then as a dispenser in the hospital at Torquay. In September 1918 Archie was posted to London; a daughter, Rosalind, was born in 1919; and in 1920 Hercule Poirot made his first appearance in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Two ...”

“... us with a box of tricks uniquely guaranteed to ensure permanent prosperity. When the long post-war boom, of which he was allegedly the ‘onlie begetter’, was succeeded in the 1970s by the disconcerting phenomenon of stagflation, the devil theory caught on, whereby Keynes was in turn arraigned as the architect of our misfortunes. A further variant was to ...”

“... the labels reveal less about Russia than about the inability of commentators to loosen the Cold War’s lingering hold on their thinking. Luke Harding was the Guardian correspondent in Russia between 2007 and 2011 who last February was turned back at Domodedovo Airport and told that his presence in the country was no longer welcome. An editorial in the ...”

“... set … not because we disliked them … but because they had brains and understood finance. As a class, we did not like brains.’ On this front, Bertie fitted in just fine. He never read a book if he could avoid it. Shortly before his coronation, he needed an operation to lance an abscess, brought on by gorging on hard lobster. While convalescing, Ridley ...”

“... were exempt from most cleaning duties and were not subject to what I, as an ex-private first class in the US army, would have called the KP (kitchen police). Einjährige could chose their own regiments, but had at the end of their year to pass a stiff examination before the regiment’s entire complement of officers. Kessler thoroughly enjoyed his period ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The mentality it describes is not universal in Mennonism nor confined to it. In an age of holy war, Toews’s protagonists have plenty of spiritual cousins. Mennonites began arriving in North America in the 17th century, with big migratory waves in the late 19th century and again after the First World War, as Prussian ...”

“... at the beginning of the 11th century by a Japanese court lady. The novel is twice the length of War and Peace, and no generation of writers in Japan has been able to ignore it. Genji has been admired, attacked and imitated, some ten thousand books have been written about it and countless articles dedicated to it in the past 950 years. We know from the ...”

“... 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 ...”