“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 of the 1950s; even in 1942, New Zealand troops were not withdrawn from the Mediterranean for war against Japan, as those of Australia were, but ended the Second World War keeping Trieste from becoming part of Yugoslavia.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 ...”

“... lighting intensifies a sense of entrapment. There are no views of la bella Napoli, no middle-class pleasures, no escape. Even the occasional landscape scenes are gloomy and untidy, cluttered with relics and abandoned buildings. To underline the community’s suffocating enclosure and isolation the film is spoken in a dialect so strong that subtitles are ...”

“... worldliness of the tone were far too whimsical and decadent for most survivors of the First World War. And then there was the lingering imperialist politics of the enterprise. FitzGerald was a rich dilettante, whose Anglo-Irish mother’s fortune from Irish rents was so large that her husband had changed his name to hers. Though FitzGerald did not join in the ...”

“... assertiveness and cultural cringing, and presenting it in dolled-up fashion to a new Norman ruling class which found the assertiveness, at least, to be convenient. Edward I’s secretaries drew on Geoffrey when they wrote to the pope in 1301, using the Arthurian story to back up Edward’s claim to be king of Scotland by right of old conquest. Politics ...”

“... because the Mahabharata – the ancient epic poem, in Sanskrit, about a disastrous fratricidal war – is such a tragic, violent book, it is dangerous to keep the whole text in your house; most people who have it stow one part of it somewhere else, just to be on the safe side. The Mahabharata, in any case, takes up quite a lot of shelf space: it contains ...”

“... in Flanders in 1917, aged 34, and although his thinking was revived in Munich after the first war, where it was described as the study of ‘speech acts’, it was not until after the second that it was developed by J.L. Austin in Oxford. In what he described as the preliminary ‘cackle’ of his presidential address on excuses to the Aristotelian ...”

“... which took a toll on his health. As early as 1753 Hume had warned him that ‘the fatigues of your class have exhausted you too much, and … you require more leisure and rest than you allow yourself.’ By the early 1760s, Smith was ‘run down through overwork’, and in 1764 he decided to leave the university. Smith resigned his chair at Glasgow for a much ...”

“... the levels of meat consumption in the West. One of the major consequences of an expanding middle class in Asia has been a huge rise in meat-eating. By 2022, China will be importing more soya for chickenfeed than the whole of Brazil currently produces: 102 million tonnes. One of the surest signs of affluence is and always has been eating more meat. It’s the ...”

“... between cormorants and herons – but it has hawkish tendencies. Sailors called it ‘the man-o’-war bird’. It’s a pirate – a kleptoparasite to scientists – known for snapping up the ill-guarded treasure of others. It can catch its own food if required and will take flying fish, but its feathers are poorly waterproofed so it avoids the waves if it ...”

“... spent five years in jail. My grandmothers suffered the humiliation of those defeated in the Civil War. My father was put in jail. My mother was politically active in the underground. It bothers me enormously to lose, I can’t stand it. And I’ve spent many years, with some friends, devoting almost all of our political activity to thinking about how we can ...”