“... to talk to me during my visit. As I wandered past the window boxes of geraniums, the sober war memorial, the parish steeples, a fire engine roared down Hochstrasse in celebration, and I glimpsed a tidy group of people disappearing into a brick Fachwerk inn. The only other signs of life were two old women on their knees scraping weeds from the grout ...”

“... the first public self-immolations, such as that of the Buddhist monk Quang Duc during the Vietnam War or the Czech student Jan Palach after the 1968 invasion; the practice was weaponised to devastating effect by Hizbullah when it launched the first suicide missions against American and French soldiers in Lebanon. This form of ‘suicide-as-a-weapon’, as ...”

“... father’s reign, and he had to be prudent if he wanted to raise the amount he needed to fight the war that he (and others) believed he was required to fight. He took a more prominent role in the leadership of the church, both locally and internationally, than was typical, but in an age of schisms and councils that was unavoidable; no other king did precisely ...”

“... Quite when that happened is disputed, but it was probably by the beginning of the first war with Carthage (264 BCE). The people of Segesta in north-western Sicily sent an embassy to Rome to appeal for an alliance on the basis of their shared Trojan ancestry: the entreaty must have made some kind of sense to the assembled senators. For a long ...”

“... and debated with Malcolm X: Condé argued that the struggle of Indian immigrants in Africa was a class issue, rather than a race issue. He was on the streets of Paris during May 1968, where he was singled out by the police and beaten, escaping with a broken nose.He returned to Guinea frequently, however, to visit Sékou Touré, leader of the Parti ...”

“... I said.That’s not true, she said.Maybe they didn’t matter.Objecting to a new memoir-writing class, Lilia suggests flower arranging would be more practical; that way, ‘you can plan your own funeral display.’ Her bad temper doesn’t bother the other residents – it’s as if they’ve been gentled into submission while they await the inevitable ...”

“... elements eventually wore him down, forcing his resignation. After a spell in the RAF during the war, he went to the LSE before spending a couple of years as an anti-colonial activist in Africa. He was elected to Parliament in 1957 at the age of 32, becoming Britain’s youngest MP. He steadily climbed the political ladder and was an increasingly prominent ...”

“... humanity,’ Milman concludes, ‘the loss of insects would be an agonising ordeal eclipsing any war and even rivalling the looming ravages of climate breakdown.’A major cause of the decline, Goulson and Milman agree, is the change from agriculture to agribusiness in recent decades. Along with the industrial use of pesticides, one of the biggest factors ...”

“... world it shines a frail light on our unsavoury situation. No doubt it’s tough to be a middle-class liberal in today’s United States, but feeling forlorn should be understood in historical terms, not passed off as a universal plight. It doesn’t seem quite the right way to describe Iranian women protesters or striking railway workers. The book speaks ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as it increasingly did to many Victorian writers, and which made her so popular with a growing class of thoughtful and responsible readers. This idiom has made a comeback today, and is often to be heard in the higher political correctness of contemporary bien pensantes, but to be fair to Gaskell (it’s perhaps too late to start calling her Stevenson ...”

“... likely to experience vivid indignation or contempt at the way in which human beings are shaped by class, periods and settings.) At the same time, Hobhouse must count as an English writer, too. Like her heroine, whom Janet Hobhouse closely resembles, she had an English father, and in part, if reluctantly, she adopted England as a country (not the country) of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It was a way of participating in high life while rejecting it, which attracted the new reading class, as did the immediacy of the aim. It satisfied a hunger for rituals. Mrs Barbauld rightly pointed out that old ghost and fairy stories had long had the aim of terrifying us pleasurably; but unmasked and stated openly it foreshadowed the industry of movie ...”