“... documented but imaginatively embroidered pursuit of ‘magnificent real facts’ in The War of the End of the World (first published in 1981), based on a bizarre and violently stirring episode in Brazilian history which had already been greatly recorded in Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertoes; or into the bewildering elaboration of revolutionary ...”

“... but what instead did I want it to sound like? Schwartz made his mark just before the Second World War when Modernism was at its most popular, and it was in this tradition that Allen Tate saw his first book, In dreams begin responsibilities, when it came out in 1938, hailing it as ‘beyond any doubt the first real innovation we’ve had since Eliot and ...”

“... So there was much to work for in 1984, and much to look forward to. Now, four years on, middle-class Hong Kong Chinese people talk, over the dinner table, not about property prices, as in Britain, but about emigration. There is scarcely a soul who does not possess a relative or a friend who is emigrating to Canada, or to Australia, or the United ...”

“... April 1968; Dayton, where John Scopes was convicted in 1925 for teaching evolution to his biology class. Tennessee still stumbles under the burden of being a Civil War battleground (the East was loyal to the Union while the Midwest supported the Confederacy) and the state government works hard to overcome this legacy of ...”

“... these views. The revolt within economics against the naive Keynesian expansionism of the post-war era has been based largely on a welcome rejection of the idea that governments can deceive citizens permanently into ignoring the decline in the value of their currency. So a degree of professional scepticism towards Akerlof is understandable, even if the ...”

“... since been regarded as their immemorial subject. Soon the tango spread. In the years before World War One it was the new social dance in Europe and North America. At this point, not surprisingly, musicians back in Buenos Aires began to worry that the form was becoming diluted by the gringos – agringado. By the Twenties Argentine tango bands had split into ...”

“... healthy bodies and ancient Greeks was not unfamiliar to the British, the males of whose ruling class had been plunging naked into icy streams for decades. And the style of this painting, with its resolutely unsensuous handling of paint and crisply distinguished bands of light on the lake, can be found in British as well as German painting. Hanging opposite ...”

“... true, as Lady Mary once claimed, that she ‘never printed a single line in my Life’, both her class and her sex fed her profound ambivalence about publishers. Most of what she wrote circulated only in manuscript; the few significant exceptions appeared anonymously, except when others chose to attach her name, accurately or not, to a poem or ...”

“... nephew is asked by a former school chum (now wearing the uniform of a British officer in the Great War), ‘are you telling me you are an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort?’ The indignant question carefully reproduces one of the few discursive means positively known to have been available in the period for making a claim of gay identity: in ...”

“... labour. Placed against Käthe Kollwitz’s later etchings of fierce rural women in The Peasants’ War, Courbet comes up short. Yet still she comes back to him, as if she cannot give up on the hope of finding some kinship with the painter who was revolutionary in so much else. At first, she falters. Usually Nochlin is a confident and straightforward writer who ...”

“... judges and the Recorder of London. Sometimes he won, which encouraged him. When the First World War broke out he saw an opportunity to initiate a witchhunt against his former friends and acquaintances and wrote a satirical pamphlet which informed wartime Britain: ‘Two foes thou hast, one there one here,/One far one ultimately near,/Two filthy fogs blot ...”

“... of the Jews’, and envies the faithful. By now, in late 1944, Germany is beginning to lose the war. Rations at Zeitz are cut, and cut again. Bread is down to a quarter loaf, the turnip soup is mostly water and the days of regular Zulage are a memory. For all his ‘good intentions’ and respect for the camp system, Gyuri has been continuously hungry and ...”

“... a military prison in Jaroslaw, Poland, close to the Eastern front, in the last months of the Great War; he had been found guilty of theft and espionage, and was probably executed in mid-1918. The subtitle of the book summarises him as a ‘racketeer and psychopath’, but a more extensive curriculum vitae assembled by van Onselen lists the following ...”

“... who, having volunteered for the Red Cross, was stationed in Alexandria during the First World War. He arranged the first translations of Cavafy’s work into English and made it known to such figures as T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Here is Forster’s description of Cavafy: a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight ...”

“... a few days, to catch the ocean breeze, and so she will escape the slaughter. Few of their social class stay in Fall River in the sweating months of June, July and August but, then, few of their social class live on Second Street, in the low part of town where heat gathers like fog. Lizzie was invited away, too, to a summer ...”