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“... view ourselves as actors presenting ourselves. So Marlon Brando could be a paraplegic after the war, he could be Zapata, Napoleon, a mafia don, or Lee Clayton, swanning around the Missouri Breaks country in a dress, a bonnet and an italic Irish accent. He might be a used-up ex-boxer on the Jersey docks. Or an actor pretending to be that punchdrunk bum few ...”

“... from the state. The gatekeeper would be the doctor providing the sick note.Before the Second World War, sick notes were in widespread use by friendly societies – working-class organisations common in Britain from the late 18th century that offered sickness and funeral benefits to members who made regular contributions to a ...”

“... of the explanation. On the one hand, the stifling parochialism and puritanism of an insular middle-class culture, with all its weight of boredom and repression, made escape abroad an instinctively attractive option for restless spirits: a motive that can be traced back to early Victorian times, when George Borrow’s fascination with Spanish or Gypsy low life ...”

“... the pan-European world itself. Political regimes which had built their national logic on the Cold War discovered that the arrangements they had sustained for forty years now seemed pointless, to their voters and to the politicians themselves. Why in Italy have a system of coalitions built around a permanent Christian Democratic majority if there is no Cold ...”

“... chain-gangs and classrooms, of Alaskan lighthouses and Guatemalan churches, or of the US Army’s war against the Modoc Indian tribes. He photographed several multipartite panoramas of San Francisco. He also photographed spectacular arrangements of clouds. Finally, he devoted himself to the many eerily obsessive motion studies of animals, birds and persons ...”

“... soldier grew more extravagant from campaign to campaign, from Quebec through the Peninsular War, from Waterloo to the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny and the two world wars. In the Napoleonic Wars, Devine estimates, some 50,000 Highlanders were recruited from a region with a population of fewer than 300,000. Queen Victoria adored her Highland warriors, and so ...”

“... means both Catholic (read, if you like, ‘Roman Catholic’) and Protestant, and both working-class and middle-class. Mid-Ulster has a fifty-fifty religious split, and was for a long time extremely poor. Its unemployment was the worst in the province, at a time when the province’s unemployment was the worst in Western ...”

“... make what Hitler did ‘look like an evil child’s fumbling toys’.A prophetess, then, a high-class soothsayer? It’s true that Arendt quotes, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) in particular, were conspicuous in the cheese dreams of the US media during the Trump presidency. Was it or wasn’t it totalitarian? Was he or wasn’t he a ...”

“... at least 500 photographs between 1910 and the 1950s – using the same ultra-primitive pre-World War One Kodak Folding Pocket Camera. Neither possessed sophisticated darkroom skills: they sent their negatives to professional processing laboratories on Jersey or else in London or Paris. The local jobbing men managed to produce some thrilling results (one ...”

“... from questions about the state’s ability to make and carry out decisions in its self-interest in class societies to questions of its contingent relationship with the entity of the nation that today is its main source of legitimacy. Further, it specifies a continuum in which the nation-state is placed at a mid-point between two poles. At one end are ...”

“... opposition to the Suez adventure and its slightly less forthright distaste for the Falklands War. Inevitably, he quotes C.P. Scott’s famous dictum that ‘comment is free, but facts are sacred’ – a sentence which is often paraphrased by snide critics on richer newspapers as ‘comment is free, but facts are expensive.’ But he leaves little doubt ...”

“... uneasy study of the author’s father, who seems to have accepted it patiently: away during the war, he was in the usual way resented by his son on his return; later he amazed him by obeying a call to the Anglican ministry. Also worth mentioning are the mildly hilarious account of the aged Freya Stark proceeding down the Euphrates on a raft, and pieces ...”

“... plenty from these neighbours, more than from their humbler brethren. A consequence was that the class relations and conflicts which were the staple of history in Europe could have no unfolding in Jewry. All the while, however, records of community life were accumulating, and very revealing use is made of them in the massive set of essays dedicated to the ...”

“... star pupil, publishing stories and poems in both the university literary magazine and higher-class publications like Prairie Schooner and Texas Monthly. But after losing enough odd jobs to stuff the résumé of any prospective novelist (stenographic temp, door-to-door salesman, bill-collector, oil-rig foreman) Thompson started making his living as a ...”

“... Burdened by the law, by self-discipline, by introspection, by a classical education and upper-class mores, Adair shuts himself into the dark hut with his opposite, bog-Irish riff-raff itself, the man of violent instinct who gives off a rank animal smell. This is an old and well-worked dichotomy for Malouf, all of whose novels, from his first, Johnno, in ...”