“... the earth’s uncultivated land, plus one third of its mineral riches. The aftermath of the Cold War allowed Beijing to come in with a low bid for Africa. In the early 1990s, after the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of bipolar politics, the West withdrew from the continent. Washington, London and even Paris, once a thriving postcolonial ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... spread into the squares and boulevards of northern areas, a sign that a less economically battered class is now also participating. In girls’ schools, the courage to scrawl a slogan on the blackboard is spreading to younger groups. Headteachers have been told to release girls one by one after school, in order to discourage gatherings and make it easier to ...”

“... served over a year in a psychiatric hospital for possessing a copy of Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, was about to go to the camps for protesting against the arrest of Alexander Ginsburg. Yevtushenko is much concerned with his reputation, but that he should be so admiring of a wealthy woman for submitting herself to the horrors of washing her own stockings ...”

“... she met John Churchill, a professional soldier and adventurer. Both came from the declining gentry class which had been hard hit by the disruptions of the civil wars. Both possessed almost startling physical beauty. And both of them were deeply emotional, highly-strung, acutely ambitious, and resolutely on the make. In 1677, they were secretly married. The ...”

“... by the Russians. The consequence of the democrats’ failure to produce a coherent ruling class, a failure compounded by the lack of any obvious economic success, is a political vacuum into which some force must step, probably sooner rather than later. It seems increasingly the case that the best one can and should hope for is not a deepening of the ...”

“... The Warriors of Hsienyang Clay-imaged warriors drilling in the sand Stand ready to be inspected by war. The kneeling archer has a lethal eye: The deft fingers of the charioteer Contain his mischievous horses as they shy. The sergeant bullshits to belie his fear. The browned-off soldiers waiting for commands Are ready to fight but disinclined to die. Rank upon ...”

“... Wind, when wilt thou blow’: we all assumed that this was the kind of thing we should be doing in class. Bateson went pretty directly to the poem; he didn’t examine the referential claims of language, the validity of literature as an institution, the university as an instrument of power, the authority of a literary canon, male domination in English ...”

“... all those years they were never separated for more than a few weeks at a time. The outbreak of war caught Nijinska in Russia, where she had gone to await the birth of her first child. Nijinsky was in the West. She did not see him again until 1921, by which time he had become incurably insane. Both the Nijinsky parents were Polish and had graduated from the ...”

“... have already been amply described. I remember my English master, twenty-five years ago, asking our class provokingly, ‘But what happens when Ted Hughes runs out of animals?’, and even among devoted Rothites there has been a tendency over the last couple of novels to greet Nathan’s regular reappearance with a mild resignation bordering on surliness. But ...”

“... of the Labour Party as an increasingly abusive marriage between a salt-of-the-earth, working-class dad, with his lived experiences and solid values, and an educated middle-class mum, with her good intentions and upwardly mobile aspirations. Not only is this touchingly politically incorrect, it’s also slightly ...”

“... was decrepit and the Catholic beast rampant again. When Froude was born, in 1818, the long cold war between Britain and Rome was rapidly thawing and a portrait of the pope was hanging in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor. In the 1820s, British Catholics were admitted first to public corporations and crown offices, then to Parliament itself: no longer ...”

“... world at bay’. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, her university class was conscripted for a year ‘to prevent future insubordination’. A blurry photocopy of Gone with the Wind circulated among her peers, but Li read differently from the other recruits. ‘I did not see myself in Scarlett O’Hara … To read oneself into ...”

“... a week – a regime which, he said, with statistical justification only, would enable one to write War and Peace every year. The drink and the misery of his first wife (who is with distressing regularity described as ‘awful’ by the witnesses Biswell quotes) ended with her death from liver failure in 1968: a crate of gin was, it’s said, delivered to their ...”

“... restaurant in suburban Petersburg (Ozerki, 20 minutes by train from the Sestroretsk station, first-class fare 25 copecks) behind whose dark veil – the veil of Isis – he sees ‘the enchanted shore/And the enchanted distance’. Lyuba, too, began to experiment: ‘I was delivered to the will of anyone who courted me with assiduity.’ Andrey Bely, the ...”