“... pathetic enough. Californians who grew up in the 1950s remember vividly the photographs of working-class women dragged kicking from their homes to clear the site of Chavez Ravine, the new stadium of the Los Angeles Dodgers, which needed plenty of space to carve out a new freeway offramp in a secluded neighbourhood. It is hard now to bring those images back to ...”

“... in 1933 he lived with his parents and older sister in the now famous 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in a middle-class suburb of Swansea. He had an undistinguished career at school: though he was a notoriously good actor and mimic, he was not academic. He worked on a local newspaper after leaving school but preferred to spend his time, when not obsessively writing his ...”

“... would have brought her, Colley says, ‘to within touching distance of Britain’s governing class’. But there was not much time for romance. The outbreak of the Seven Years War brought the threat of French invasion, and led to Milbourne’s hurried transfer to Gibraltar. Gibraltar was also under threat; if ...”

“... increasingly tyrannical measures to suppress radical discontent, and as England and France went to war, Wordsworth went from feeling ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/But to be young was very heaven!’ to saying that he ‘Yielded up moral questions in despair’. That mental trajectory had poetic consequences.Roe takes us through that process moment ...”

“... became more prevalent in the gradual and fraught transition from a feudal order to a modern class society. For Baker, though, Marat did not need to be radicalised by failure. He was less a product of modernity than someone entirely out of place in it: ‘His call for terror was as reactionary as it was revolutionary.’ Borrowing from the Platonic ...”

“... off my hat to Balzac! I must open it!’ Satire can’t buy you friends but it buys you a better class of enemy (the aphorism, originally applied to money, has a ring of Karl Kraus but is Spike Milligan’s). Bennett had been dead for five years when Cape announced the imminent appearance of The Roaring Queen in 1936, but there was enough disobliging matter ...”

“... discrete composition blocks, each enriched (again like a wedding-cake) to maximum capacity. In a class-structure of poetic forms, it is perhaps aptly described as nouveau-riche. Oldham seems at home with that, and the fact may reflect (stylistically rather than biographically speaking) his own odd relations with the court wits. Sardanapalus, traditionally a ...”

“... parodic woman’s novel seems initially all about. The title proclaims another skirmish in the sex war, and an unprepossessing jacket reinforces this theme: an unnaturally small, weakly-looking male, the hero, Stanley Duke, is threatened by a half-circle of four towering women. The blurb beckons to women to read, in order to be outraged: ‘it is not a book ...”

“... twice, which proved to me once and for all that I was not cut out for education. After the last war began, my cousins, one by one, were called up into the Army. A few months later, they came out again, one by one, and went home, and burned their uniforms in the bedroom grate. They then lived, without identity-card or ration-book or gas-mask, and went on ...”

“... in recent years, it has fallen, ineffective, to the ground. One million marched against the war in Iraq (I think it was one, Judt says two, I loved the inflation): it made no difference. There is a fundamental ‘disconnect’ between the people and those who claim to represent them. As the last 18 months have so brutally testified, the ...”

“... Hunchback of Notre Dame): Hitler had just invaded Poland. Two days later, France declared war on Germany. In 1946, backed by a socialist mayor, Raymond Picaud, and funded by the Confédération Générale du Travail (which still sits on the board, to little effect) and local unions – restaurateurs, hoteliers and even bakers – and following a huge ...”

“... which were taking place in the Belgian Congo. Who could foresee his own terrible fate during the war as he stood in our drawing room passionately denouncing the cruelties he had seen? Conrad’s biographer Frederick Karl is unsure when this visit took place, but if we are to believe Casement’s Black Diary – and Angus Mitchell, who has edited The Amazon ...”

“... American by dint of having lived in the United States followed by service in the Army during World War One. Partly because this alternative was not only implausible but imposed on me, I found it far from convincing. To say ‘I am an American citizen’ in the setting of an English school, with wartime Cairo dominated by British troops and what seemed to me a ...”

“... Larache.‘One time,’ R.D. said, ‘Yasin broke his foot. He came up the stairs to our science class on his crutches. He comes in, one foot in a cast and on the other he had a Moroccan slipper, like a belgha, a thing you’d only wear at home, this round thing made of leather. All the Moroccans knew what it was and we laughed. So everyone remembers the ...”

“... Beuret with Sackville-West, his international success had carried him far from his working-class origins, and even further from those of the provincial peasant who still shared his life. Most accounts of Beuret date from his years of fame, when gossip dismissed her as a ‘little washerwoman without any capacity for communication with him’ (Edmond de ...”