“... lovers perversely inflict on one another with the theme of a couple tragically divided by race and class – a theme which appears again and again in Fante’s writing, but rarely with the success of Ask the Dust. As a starving writer who asks difficult questions and lives an intense inward life, however, Bandini strongly resembles the hero of Hamsun’s other ...”

“... people with proper jobs and people who had just left school, but not, on the whole, rich or middle-class people. Not professionals. We were just enthusiastic amateurs, people from small towns who thought we could change the world but had absolutely no idea how. What we really wanted to do was change ourselves, to become different from what we knew we were, be ...”

“... admired his ‘martyrdom’. They also liked his anti-Communism, his loathing for materialism and class conflict, his belief that rich and poor should work together as a single people. The wealthy invited him to salons, the middle classes read him in their newspapers. To finance his shoestring conspiracies, he wrote widely not only on politics but on art and ...”

“... 20th-century European crisis of representation provoked by the collapse of empires and impending war, when the seemingly fixed barriers of class, gender and racial privilege started to implode. In fact, for one influential version of this account, the crisis begins earlier, in 1848, when revolutions across Europe shredded ...”

“... it’s different now,’ he said. ‘My parents’ generation stopped voting Labour over the Iraq War. But these things have their cycles.’One of the 56 SNP MPs elected in the 2015 general election, when the narrowish failure of the independence referendum the year before and the excitement generated by the Yes campaign led to a huge increase in the SNP ...”

“... be terrible in strictly human ways, and, in pursuit of that, that a decent novel can animate class differences without seeming to be a fan of them. This was instinctive for Isherwood, and works its way out in his books as dramatic empathy and a calm inclusivity of style. You can tell he would be a generous friend just by reading his sentences. To be the ...”

“... to support Kerensky’s doomed government and its commitment to staying in the First World War.Russian populism, as Chris Ely points out in his new history, was concerned with more than revolutionary aspirations or a rhetorical emphasis on ‘the people’. Its origins lay in the enormous cultural gulf that had emerged in Russia after the reforms of ...”

“... terms as a collapse of energy and pleasure – which intensified with the launch of SSRIs, a new class of antidepressant, in the late 1980s. Anxiety staggered on in DSM-III in the form of ‘generalised anxiety disorder’ (a catch-all for cases that didn’t fit other diagnoses, not least because they seemed to be unresponsive to antidepressants), but by ...”

“... preface, as the singular work that elaborated the ‘fundamental principles of the great working-class movement, not only in Germany and Switzerland, but in France, in Holland and Belgium, in America, and even in Italy and Spain’. Growing in stature and influence as its message spread across the Continent, Capital had become ‘the Bible of the working ...”

“... centres. When I began to ask people where the church was during what became known as the Dirty War, no one had much to tell me.Twenty-eight years later, in 2013, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who had been in Buenos Aires through the reign of the generals, was elected pope, I wondered what his response to the disappearances had been. What was he doing, what ...”

“... his ‘extensive and penetrating study’ of international communism just after the First World War, when he was put in charge of the ‘radical division’ of the Justice Department. He spent his whole life in Washington – his family had lived there for generations – and never seems to have doubted that he’d follow his forebears into government ...”

“... and traumatic violence, from the Balkan wars to the Armenian genocide and the First World War. The most serious opposition was from Turkey’s Kurdish population, who objected to the ethnic and linguistic homogenising imperative behind Kemal’s Kulturkampf. But resistance was brutally repressed. Indeed, any opposition to the one-party state ...”

“... has always depended on the contingencies of biology as well as those of time and place, gender, class and race.For those in industrialised countries where reproductive care is more readily – if by no means universally – available, having biological children has come to be seen as a matter of choice. Although women have been practising methods of ...”

“... in a wholly oral tradition the idea of recording in writing a lengthy composition on the Trojan War. Be that as it may, Gilgamesh holds a further interest for Homeric specialists (though not only for them) in that we can trace its evolution back for nearly a millennium and a half; the antecedents of the Iliad and Odyssey are matters of speculation, but ...”

“... years, by protecting their lives and property against attack by extreme elements during the Civil War that followed the Treaty in the South, by leaving untouched the possession of all pre-Reformation church property by the Anglican Church of Ireland, and, for example, by providing additional grants for school transport for Protestants in view of their ...”