“... have been regarded as an idle dreamer. Indonesia, devastated by ten years of military occupation, war and revolution, had a literacy rate of not more than 10 per cent. Even a decade later, the income accruing to the Indonesian state was not much bigger than that of a large American university. The Philippine economy, weak even in colonial times, had been ...”

“... attic.I used to come to Ian Allan’s shop with my children after our excursions to the Imperial War Museum. That sentence may say more about my childhood than theirs – and about the retrospective mood of Britain more generally – but I look back on that time fondly. A bright winter’s day, the journey south across the Thames on the top deck of a number ...”

“... died in an asylum in New Orleans. Anil’s Ghost (2000) takes on the opening years of the civil war in Ondaatje’s native Sri Lanka. In The English Patient (1992), a man is dying from burns in Italy amid the mayhem of the Second World War. The new novel, Warlight, unfolds – in London and Suffolk and the lower reaches ...”

“... have sifted the archives to unearth ‘Marx before Marxism’. But who is Marx after Marxism? Cold War reflexes may still make it difficult to reread the Manifesto with fresh eyes. But the world is no longer divided into lethally armed Marxist and anti-Marxist camps. Somnambulant cadres have ceased reciting the work as a secular catechism, while upright ...”

“... Milovan​ Djilas was second only to Tito in the communist hierarchy of postwar Yugoslavia. In the war years, he had gained a reputation as a warrior-intellectual who could think dialectically under machine-gun fire. In Tito’s government, he served as minister without portfolio and styled himself as the state philosopher ...”

“... and Iris Murdoch all matriculated at Oxford in the late 1930s. When most of the men went off to war, they found themselves, as women philosophy students, in a very unusual situation – not in the minority and on the periphery, but central and predominant. (The rule in normal times had been that no more than a fifth of the undergraduates at Oxford could be ...”

“... Anna Davin has risen admirably to the challenges facing the historian of working-class life in London. Dealing with the documents is daunting enough. To begin with, there are 17 volumes of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London, published between 1889 and 1903. For all its faults it is the first survey of outcast London that can be described as social science and it remains a unique quarry of ‘statistics of poverty’, recording how much (or little) Whitechapel widows got paid for glueing a gross of matchboxes or how they fed a family of 14 on a few coppers a day ...”

“... Brazil and South Korea conduct around 85 per cent of their trade in dollars.In Trade Wars Are Class Wars (2020), Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis showed that the US functions as the world’s importer of last resort – absorbing the trade surpluses of Europe and China – and that the American working class pays the ...”

“... money would be better spent on frontline military operations.’ Clegg described Trident as a Cold War weapon, and added: ‘the world has changed.’ Chris Huhne, the energy secretary and, like Clegg, a member of Britain’s new National Security Council, went further in the Sunday Telegraph that same week. ‘I believe you can see alternatives,’ he ...”

“... roots and broader intellectual influence than any other force in the country. Confined by the Cold War to forty years of national opposition, the party entrenched itself in local and later regional administrations, and in the parliamentary commissions through which Italian legislation must pass, becoming entwined with the ruling order at many secondary ...”

“... volumes. Where did the money come from? Shanghai International is one of China’s ‘Double First Class’ universities, intended to become world-class by 2050. But in the meantime there are 36 Class A and six Class B universities that outrank the ...”

“... an important, and entirely valid, role in the teaching of American history. Since the Second World War the history of the United States has established itself as a reputable and increasingly popular subject in British colleges and universities, and in the last few years this interest has filtered down to the schools. Those undergraduates and sixth-formers ...”

“... for Gosford Park, minus Altman’s cinematic originality but retaining Maggie Smith as stock upper-class matriarch, found its proper level when Fellowes, understanding what it really was, both stretched and slackened it into a TV soap opera with frocks and pinnies. Although of course the pre and post-Great War setting ...”

“... of an intellectually adventurous life begins with an immensely normal, typically English, middle-class family and an ordinary public school education: no disturbing precocity as a schoolboy, no outward brilliance marking him out, as Russell and F.P. Ramsey were marked out in their earlier years. Mr Hodges includes photographs of seaside family ...”

“... engine: the Rolls-Royce Merlin, famous for having powered most Spitfires during the Second World War. I don’t know what every part does, but there is pleasure in trying to parse a sentence in a foreign language. The Merlin is now downstairs, labelled as ‘the engine which saved Britain’, close by Miss England, a contender for the water speed record, in ...”