“... the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned on its own grave.’ In this splendid pre-war novel we meet Thomas Quayne, a successful businessman, and his smart wife Anna, both in their thirties: very comfortable, three servants, one char, no children, living in a moderately elegant house, though not a Nash house, on the Outer Circle of Regent’s ...”

“... China in the ten years between its conquest of power and 1958, and had left the chaos of the civil war and late Republican China behind. The first two five-year plans had achieved high levels of growth in industry and agriculture and the Chinese had fought the United States to a standstill in Korea. For the elite, then, the success of the Revolution, of ...”

“... Coal was delivered by horse and cart, as was milk, and when I was evacuated during the war – though I find this hard to believe now – I went to Ripon market by horse and cart. On the other hand, I have never been to a horse-race. Stubbs was born and brought up in Liverpool, then moved to York, and then beyond York to an area even more remote ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Orwell. He accused Greene of being a spiritual snob, who had turned Hell into ‘a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only’. Even sharper criticism came from his fellow Catholics. Evelyn Waugh called Scobie’s spiritual deal a ‘mad blasphemy, for the God who accepted that sacrifice could be neither just nor ...”

“... reports, ‘James began to form friendships of a more significant kind – with members of his own class, the writers and artists of London.’ There was something in the air of the early 1880s and he began to allow it to enter his mind, an air ‘full of events, of changes, of movement (some people would say of revolution, but I don’t think that)’.When ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”