“... confining themselves – as Timothy Brennan usefully reminds us – to no more for now but a holy war or jihad against the school known as ‘literary modernisn’. Of course religion is a thing of this world rather than the next, and there have always been, since well before Greenmantle, ‘their’ Muslims and ‘ours’. Nothing is more ironic than to hear ...”

“... of Catholicism, to their involvement in catamaran fishing (and hence their evolution into a class of capitalist boat-owners), to their retention of traditional caste and kin loyalties in their recruitment to occupational roles, or to their philanthropic largesse in their local roles as community leaders. Again, all these hypotheses may be valid, and if ...”

“... The pataphysician Alfred Jarry was so excited by the close-fitting kit that, before the First War, he took to dressing in the uniform of a cycle racer. He caused a scandal by following Mallarmé’s funeral cortège on his bicycle. Jarry’s provocative text ‘The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race’ was the acknowledged inspiration for ...”

“... His father, Abd al-Qadir, was a sheikh who had fought in the 1936 Arab Revolt and in the 1948 war with Israel; he had also been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the militant Islamist group founded in Egypt in 1928. Mishal, during his childhood in Silwad, saw little of his father: in 1957, Abd al-Qadir had taken a second wife and moved with her to ...”

“... manning a gun in Baghdad, stencilled on the front of the gun a death’s head. That’s why the war is lost. 25 January. I’ve taken to eating the occasional date, though it’s not a fruit I wholly like. Mam used to eat them when we were little, bought in small compressed bricks, one of their attractions being that they were not on the ration or even on ...”

“... all the more striking when we remember that France was then still in the throes of the Algerian war). In this sense, the Nietzschean motto of the eternal return, which gave the journal its name, stands as something of a deliberate provocation: ‘I want the world, and I want it as it is’ – tel quel. In contrast to the newly revived Nouvelle Revue ...”

“... a rise and fall in the fortunes of many of the subjects.’ Again: ‘While the emerging middle class was in general looking more to reading as a source of information, enlightenment and entertainment, middle-class women in particular were looking for confirmation and clarification of their own new ...”

“... the idea that this particular model of living can be successful when inhabited by the middle-class intelligentsia, but … it can be a wholesale prescription neither for the welfare state nor for the renewal of the traditional city as the 20th century disastrously demonstrated.’ That is a lot of weight for two blocks of luxury flats to carry. Anxious ...”

“... of them) put on German uniform and fought the Red Army and the Poles in a guerrilla war which lasted until 1947. Fearless candour has not paid off in Lviv’s past. When I was there, the orange ribbon was everywhere; the region had voted 91 per cent for Yushchenko and the mayor was giving press interviews for freedom and democracy. But the happy ...”

“... Machiavelli’s The Prince or Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier or Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Yet her whole life, and especially her motherhood, was a vernacular paraphrase of these classics. For example, in Mother Land, as in Sun Tzu’s China, there were five classes of spies: local spies, inward spies, converted spies, doomed spies and surviving ...”

“... insight into a magisterial comparative analysis of the variant property relations thrown up by class struggles on the land across Europe, and their consequences for the development of agrarian capitalism – deploying the same three-way contrast between Eastern Europe, England and France in a fully systematic framework. Brenner’s account was widely seen ...”

“... of the 1950s; even in 1942, New Zealand troops were not withdrawn from the Mediterranean for war against Japan, as those of Australia were, but ended the Second World War keeping Trieste from becoming part of Yugoslavia. This imperial area possessed a consciously-preserved history which was less that of empire or ...”

“... He was born in Turin on 31 July 1919; he graduated in chemistry – he was top of his class at Turin University – on 12 June 1941; he came to Auschwitz on 26 February 1943 and was liberated in January 1945; he returned to Turin and by 1948 settled into work at Siva, a firm that made varnishes and associated products, where he remained for almost ...”

“... standing trial. How somebody as worldly and bright as Wilde, so alert to the laws of the ruling class and at the receiving end of so much advice and so vulnerable to blackmail and so broke, could have been led so easily towards his downfall remains a mystery. But there are crucial aspects of his make-up and background, especially in the quality of his ...”

“... pique at not being given a bigger role at party conference and broke with Starmer over Israel’s war in Gaza. But the more obvious relationship is of kinship: Burnham presides over a scale model of a future Starmer Britain, one where a social democratic leader full of genuine desire to mend the broken, over-marketised public realm is hamstrung by lack of ...”