“... patients, like Brandt, were German. The spread of TB was one of the legacies of the First World War. As Paul Delany tells us, in Germany TB sufferers doubled in number in the last two years of the war, when ‘soap disappeared completely, and the streetcars were foul with the distinctive stench of famine.’ Rolf ...”

“... pushed waves of Irish immigrants into Liverpool cellars and court housing. Before the Second World War, thirty thousand people still lived in such conditions, enduring the slow violence of poverty. Slum clearance during my childhood made a difference, but to walk into the centre of the city was to pass through terraced streets in which the old patterns were ...”

“... low salaries, growing unemployment and – since 1982 – recession, despite the recent post-war boom. With no other outlet for public discontent, a minority religious sect is broadening into a political movement. The fundamentalist foot-soldiers come from religious universities. Their leaders are a new breed of religious intellectual who, unlike the old ...”

“... It cannot, in other words, be an American value. The town’s secret is that during the war some of its inhabitants murdered a farmer of Japanese descent. The guilty parties assume that Tracy’s John Macreedy has come to investigate the crime, when his mission is much simpler: to deliver a bravery medal to the father of the man who saved his life ...”

“... three infant grandchildren for the first time’; ‘For the first time since she’d begun the class he could see unmistakably how attractive she must have been before the degeneration of an ageing spine took charge of her life.’ Where the text settles into third-person narrative and gives us direct speech, our awareness that this is the memory of a ...”

“... of A la recherche, in particular Marcel’s return to Paris, now strikingly decayed after World War One, although unlike Proust, Lampedusa provides no theory of redemptive art at the end. In his final illness and death the prince lies in a shabby Palermo hotel, exhausted by his trip back from Naples, where he had gone to see a specialist. Concetta and ...”

“... stable, propertied lives.There’s another factor swelling and enriching St Albans: the middle-class exodus from London, a twenty-minute commute away. As renting in London gets more expensive and as buying becomes hard for people who are well paid but lack inherited wealth, the city is losing more people to commuter towns and other parts of Britain than it ...”

“... treats him fairly gently; he was a Kingsman and had been Forster’s boss in Egypt during the war. Lubbock greatly admired Strether, the ‘central consciousness’ of The Ambassadors (the very book Forster chose to disparage). Forster concedes that James was devoted to his ‘aesthetic duty’, ‘but at what sacrifice! . . . Most of human life has to ...”

“... de la France’ and is evidently intended as a cry of protest against the anguish and horror of war – perhaps too evidently. Where the outer movements of En blanc et noir communicate an exhilarating effortlessness, the energy of the middle movement seems blocked, as if the music were inhibited by its own high aims. A grim procession of broken and ...”

“... compensation for the Puritan closure of the theatres) the escape, on the eve of the second civil war in 1648, of Charles’s teenage son, the future James II, from Parliamentarian captivity in a ‘very pretty’ female costume, and the exposure beneath a maid’s petticoat of the masculinity of Sir George Booth, the fleeing leader of the rising against the ...”

“... the moon. You feel a bit for Aldrin. Like Collins, he went to West Point – he was third in his class. Like Armstrong, he had been a noted pilot in the Korean War. He had an air of entitlement about him. But his mother, born Marion Moon, killed herself a year before he went into space and after the mission he began to ...”

“... Britain’s industrial decline and the sudden Middle East oil price hike after the Yom Kippur war of 1973 meant that nationalist economics no longer seemed so daft or unworldly. The energy crisis contributed to political instability at Westminster. In the indecisive general election of February 1974, the SNP took seven seats, and after the election which ...”

“... Napoleon interpreted his actions as threatening independence and invaded. The ensuing war was fiery and bloody. In May 1802, Leclerc and Louverture reached an apparent détente and Louverture agreed to retire. But the following month, Leclerc lured him to a meeting, had him arrested and sent to France.The Common Wind, which takes its title from ...”

“... play, particularly for the more realist form of film, have needed a motivation for this, from the war between Messaline and Illyria explained in an ominous voiceover in Trevor Nunn’s 1996 film, to an overriding need to play in the boys’ football team in Andy Fickman’s likeable 2006 adaptation, She’s the Man.) Whereas in The Tempest the storm has left ...”

“... de Grâce is the story of a ménage à trois, set in the Baltic states during the Russian Civil War: Erick, his fellow soldier Conrad and Conrad’s sister, Sophie, are thrown together by the conflict. After Erick rejects Sophie’s love, they move apart ideologically, but when Sophie is captured she asks that Erick be the one to execute her. He ...”