“... are not identical groups, and that literacy in someone else’s culture, as for many upper-class Indians under British rule, if not accompanied by equality of opportunity, may foster a hostile nationalism. Anderson is sometimes led away by trivia, or by the desire to present a paradox. ‘There has not been an English dynasty ruling in London since the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... trying to cheat them. His girlfriend, Candy, wears a skintight yellow jumpsuit to a job-training class, then is devastated when she is told she looks ‘tacky’. Ray wants so desperately to be a real businessman that he even forbids anyone to sell drugs in his social club. But he can’t negotiate the maze of bureaucratic rules and regulations governing new ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... But French support continued to dwindle. By 1408 the campaign had degenerated into a guerrilla war, and by early 1409 the self-proclaimed Prince of Wales was a desperate and hunted man. The revolt destroyed what little trust existed between the English and the Welsh inhabitants of Wales, shattering any pretence of parity between them. Despite the fact that ...”

“... in Henry Fielding, who was not only a novelist, a playwright and a magistrate but a prolific high-class journalist and editor. In his day there were no book reviews as such, though books might be discussed along with other matters of topical interest. Soon, in the mid-century, a more specialised literary journalism took hold. The preferred style was of ...”

“... 162 countries (those ranked lower were all experiencing, or had recently experienced, a state of war). Life expectancy at birth was 40 years, and it’s falling. The greatest worry is that many Malawian households are caught in a desperate poverty trap. Employment is both hard to come by and very poorly paid (the minimum legal wage is around £11 a ...”

“... of Germany during trials of various amphetamines, but never marketed. In the Second World War various applications for MDMA were tested by the American Forces, which had evidence that it could fend off exhaustion and act as an appetite suppressant, as well as being a truth drug useful in interrogation. MDMA was rediscovered and studied by Alexander ...”

“... and defiance rather than as escape, a mystical as well as a political union with the working class (working, but for the moment unemployed). Lehmann kept them more or less happy with money, clothes, cigarette-lighters and fountain-pens. It was, as he wrote himself, ‘a contact with earthiness that I needed very badly’. He desired wholeness, and ...”

“... statistician-cum-metaphysician.Although his history has an 18th-century prologue and a post-World War Two epilogue, the real action takes place c.1835-1935, when governments in Europe and the US established official statistical bureaux, when there was quantitative data-gathering on an unprecedented scale, when social reformers looked to statistics to diagnose ...”

“... evidence, he argues that Cosa Nostra, having regained its strength after the Second World War, laundered drug money from the mid-1970s through a small bank in Milan, Banca Rasini, where Berlusconi’s father had worked all his life and which lent substantial sums to Silvio’s real estate business. Despite the best efforts of prosecutors, it has ...”

“... with so little affection that when it was destroyed by bombs during the Second World War she was ‘rather pleased’. Linda Lear suggests, plausibly, that the grimness of Potter’s childhood was exaggerated by her earlier biographers. Certainly it was materially comfortable but it was strikingly austere. The older Potters were affectionate in ...”

“... taunt the oddballs in their midst; other targets were orphans (Ya ya ya, your father died in the war!) and Jews. My father was not in fact a Communist, he was an independent, a maverick who ran the Australian Council for Civil Liberties as a front organisation for himself, I thought, though others said for the Communists. It might have been easier for us if ...”

“... of Negroes’. Nella meanwhile was working as a librarian in Harlem. During the First World War, she took a job as a nurse in the Bronx, an occupation she returned to in the later part of her life. The idea that she wished to get above herself, by playing up her European heritage at the expense of the West Indian, nevertheless took hold. Hutchinson ...”

“... unruly relationships’), Essay Recitation (followed by a 20-minute question and answer period), War of the Words (Coleridge/Wordsworth face-offs), Sixty Minutes of an Impressive Novel (selections included The Great Gatsby [Fitzgerald, 1925] and The Sound and the Fury [Faulkner, 1929]), and the Van Meer Radio Theatre Hour, featuring such plays as Mrs ...”