“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... parts of the world, where secondary effects such as economic disruption, disease, famine and war will be experienced most acutely. Climate change is therefore likely to have a disproportionate impact on the vulnerable and exacerbate existing inequalities. A mid-range increase in global temperatures, which might be quite pleasant in Canada, is potentially ...”

“... The Act instructs the board to take into consideration, not just the literary merit but also the class of reader which may reasonably be expected to read each book. So, as the writer Lee Dunne would point out fifty years later, ‘A book that is clean at five pounds is dirty at fifty pence.’ Members of the Catholic Truth Society, established to assist the ...”

“... in Northern Ireland to research and write the article, I realised that the Catholics are second-class citizens. They live in terrible slums, in poverty, and know no way of improving their conditions. I have not set a novel in Northern Ireland simply because I do not know enough about it. I dislike cant – you get that from politicians. Writers have to dig ...”

“... 1941’ (‘Burgled’), to ‘Sophia Tolstoy’s Carpal Tunnels, 1863’ (‘After transcribing War and Peace for the ninth time, Sophia Tolstoy lifted her wrists to the sky, tried to unball her fingers, and let her numb fists fall to the table: “I’m Sorry”’), before depositing us at last in front of ‘Lincoln’s Mirror, 1865’: What you are ...”

“... and inequality, arguing that the race was ‘a symbol of a lot of issues in Britain around class. Seventy per cent of the government pushing through very significant cuts are Oxford or Cambridge graduates.’ He was charged with causing a public nuisance and given a six-month prison sentence (he was released on a tag after two months in Wormwood ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of history. The Lithuanians had at first run into a wall of hatred from the Scottish working class who perceived them, not entirely without reason, as cheap foreign labour brought in to collapse miners’ wages. The Italian community was utterly unprepared for the ferocious anti-Italian riots which flamed through Scottish towns and cities in July ...”

“... 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 ...”