“... were sometimes to be found lecturing in Sicily or Slovenia when they should have been teaching a class in New Jersey. At once prestigious and contentious, prized and reviled, theory was a way of amassing cultural capital for oneself as well as a source of genuinely exciting insights. Guileless souls content simply to read Jane Eyre now languished in the ...”

“... meant that ‘the sanctity of monarchy itself would soon be called into question,’ and civil war become imaginable. Though she is clear that ‘James I of England differed little from James VI of Scotland,’ Doran is not concerned with how James’s English self diverged from his Scottish one, but with the ways in which he differed – or didn’t ...”

“... A New World Trilogy (1973) satirises the continuing attachment of the West Indian middle class to the European religious and social legacy, suggesting West African – and in particular Akan – culture as a preferable alternative. Walcott wouldn’t deny his African or his European ancestry: but, having been born and brought up in St Lucia, and ...”

“... of Europe’s Inner Demons (his recently reissued study of medieval witch-hunters) in terms of class. Both groups were motivated by ‘the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil’. But, Cohn suggests, millenarianism flourished ‘amongst the marginal ...”

“... from the main road by a knee-high wall from which the railings had been removed during the war. Here William’s green-fingered wife, Hetta, had made a verdant brief oasis of multi-coloured shrubbery: japonica, Japanese tree peony, clematis, forsythia, almond blossom, euphorbia, a rustic arch of rambling roses, all manner of bulbs, and a dwarf oak cut ...”

“... Nora and their two children were forced to leave Trieste for Zurich. With Italy’s entry into the war, the Austro-Hungarian authorities were anticipating trouble from the city’s large Italian and foreign populations. Joyce’s income for the rest of the year would come to £99, of which £24 was provided by a kind relative, and £75 by a subvention from the ...”

“... as a record. My grandmother kept one before and during the early part of the Second World War, and before I deposited it with Newcastle University I read through it at a stretch. What was extraordinary was that I started to feel as if I really didn’t know what was going to happen next. Nazi-Soviet pact? Not nice, but perhaps it means we shan’t be ...”

“... have had more confidence in its own position. Despite the horrors committed in the ‘people’s war’ – the necklacings, the soft target bombings, the assassinations, and the murder and torture in the guerrilla camps – any reasonable body would have found that the wrongs committed by apartheid were far greater and no one could have robbed the ANC of ...”

“... when Laurel McKelva Hand finds her dead mother’s breadboard in a kitchen cupboard. A middle-aged war widow, she returns to her Mississippi birthplace in time to watch her recently remarried father die, and to confront Wanda Fay, his obnoxious wife. Toward this young woman (a ‘ball of fluff’, as Helen McNeil calls her in a fine introduction to the ...”

“... became a humorous lecturer to raise funds for the Belgians in 1914, but, apart from that, World War One (in this volume, anyway) hardly registers. Suddenly, on page 310, there is a reference to Hitler, and the shock is like that administered in The Code of the Woosters when Wodehouse starts writing about dictators. The small-town satires are the best ...”

“... in its way, a very reassuring sign, for it was clear that for those van Tonder represents the Boer War is still going on, just as it always has, and that even the arrival in power of Nelson Mandela has not disturbed their way of thinking. A little later, van Tonder applauded the Government’s decision to remove the names of Afrikaner Nationalist premiers from ...”

“... Burma.) American imperialism also played a big part. It is easy to forget that in the post-World War Two era, the regime in Washington has killed or maimed more foreigners than any other country in the whole world: a world-class killer, one might say, matched arithmetically only by the Maoist regime’s cruelties towards ...”

“... she published ‘Speed the Plough’, a short story about a shell-shocked veteran of the Great War, and a minor masterpiece. Her first novel, Ashe of Rings, an ambitious work weighed down by symbolism, appeared four years later. The most productive years were 1925 to 1930, when she left London for good to live alternately in Paris and Villefranche, a small ...”

“... as Monsieur Hulot in ‘Les Vacances de M. Hulot’ (1953). In the decades after the Second World War, another supremely accomplished mime artist with a lively sense of the possibilities of film emerged as a plausible successor to the Tramp. Jacques Tati, born in 1907 and raised in one of Paris’s grandest suburbs, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, had by then broken ...”

“... they were drinking too much, and drove everyone home safely. He was captain of the tennis team and class president. He was handsome, had a boisterous and occasionally bawdy sense of humour (Hunter gives no evidence of this, but Obama also testified to it in his eulogy), and liked the Grateful Dead and REM. He once confessed a wish to be a ...”