“... answer to the problem of death and to the crisis of meaning and values occasioned by the war. Three pieces – and a short story, ‘The House of the Famous Poet’ – describe her sudden feeling of writerly vocation while sheltering from V-1 bombs in Louis MacNeice’s house in 1944. Her calling was ‘intensified by … the knowledge that ...”

“... but thought of himself as Spanish. Cerreño came from a small town near Seville and a rural gentry class that was spiralling downwards along with Spain’s agricultural output. The liberalisation of trade in the last years of the 18th century offered these men opportunities: one as a slave-trader, the other as a sea captain. But Grandin’s most impressive ...”

“... in the 1930s. Tessimond was born in Birkenhead in 1902 into a relatively prosperous middle-class family; his father was a bank inspector. Like Thomas Lovell Beddoes, an earlier oddball of British poetry, he was sent to Charterhouse School; he can’t have enjoyed it much, for when he was 16 he ran away to London, naively hoping to establish himself as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... laboured were called. Prices for everything skyrocketed: eggs were a dollar apiece in 1849, and a war broke out later over control of the stony Farallones islands rookery thirty miles west of San Francisco, where seabirds’ eggs were gathered to augment what the chickens could produce. A good pair of boots was a hundred dollars. Land downtown was so valuable ...”

“... devastating book could have been surprised: Egyptians, he suggests, were defeated before the war even started. In Robyn Creswell’s new translation, That Smell seems not so much written as secreted; it leaves you feeling tense and clammy, as it must have done when it was first published. Ibrahim was 29 then, and only two years out of prison, where ...”

“... patients in asylums. It was soon incorporated into the decennial US census. During the First World War it was used for assessing army recruits, perhaps the first time it was put to diagnostic use. Although the manual is American, it is much used elsewhere, despite the fact that the International Classification of Diseases, drawn up under the auspices of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... appear in their ordinary business and their ordinary pleasures’. He was thinking only of middle-class men – ‘the crowds of the exchange and the coffee house … the convivial table’ – and probably not of women at all, but even such men figure only ‘minimally in his History, driven out by high affairs of state’. Gender relations – ‘at least ...”

“... politics and the media – seemed to express exactly what people felt about greed, corruption and class entitlement in the 1980s. Historians of their own lifetimes admired the thickly detailed but not soppily nostalgic way Coe defined the 1970s in The Rotters’ Club (2001): the Longbridge factory, the IRA, the NME, grammar schools, the Zep. Pleasing both ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the sullen teenager in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. Merry, who runs away from her middle-class home to join the underground and plant bombs in the name of peace, is another ‘problem child’ of the 1960s – ‘chaos itself’, in Roth’s phrase. It is Merry who prompts her father, Swede Levov, to wonder despairingly: ‘What happened to our smart ...”

“... order to impose their authority. That had been the way Zanla dominated these villages during the war and it now guaranteed a monolithic Zanu vote at the polls. Christopher Soames, the British pro-consul sent out to supervise the election, knew exactly what was going on but balked at the notion of taking military action to get the guerrillas back into their ...”

“... cloves for £76. Nutmeg was so valuable that the Treaty of Breda, ending the second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667, delivered the tiny nutmeg island of Run to the Dutch in exchange for another island colony in America then known as New Amsterdam. When Samuel Pepys inspected a captured Dutch East India Company ship, seized in 1665, he was amazed by its ...”