“... long jean shorts and a Homer Simpson T-shirt; his eyes are ringed with yellow-blue shadows. ‘To be honest, this place takes so much out of me,’ he says. ‘It’s hard to pull away when I get home. I certainly swear at home more because I’m allowed to, but other than that really, unless I’ve got a couple of days off together, I do feel I’ve lost a ...”

“... walking to the podium. McCarthy rushed over from Paris to help, then was joined from New York by Lotte Köhler, Arendt’s longtime assistant. The following year McCarthy and Köhler were appointed joint executors after Arendt suffered a second heart attack and died in her Riverside Drive apartment.‘The Arendt cult is a riddle,’ Walter Laqueur sighed ...”

“... Once​ upon a time, the distribution of power and privilege was determined by birth. Now, it is determined by merit. And that, in a nutshell, is the history of the long 20th century.It may be a parody, but this little narrative encapsulates one of the structuring claims of contemporary public debate ...”

“... was tuppence-halfpenny an hour. Sherard described it as a ‘terribly ugly and depressing town’.By the time my father arrived in 1938, it had grown even more ugly and rundown during the Great Depression. Mechanisation had all but killed manual chain-making, and most of the coal pits had fallen into disuse. Unemployment figures were so high, even in that era ...”

“... a postage-stamp, at a time when Rosa Luxemburg adorned West German mail. Such treatment, it might be argued, is not without all justice. For in a comparative perspective, did not the English Civil War – however traumatic at the time – prove in the end to be the least significant of the political upheavals that ushered ...”

“... the assertion of this difference would have been superfluous, but in many circles it has come to be an article of faith that the idea of a distinctively literary system of facts and values is at best an illusion and at worst an imposition by the powers that be of an orthodoxy designed to ...”

“... only an affiliated organisation like the ILP, the Fabian Society or a trade union), which was by far the most powerful body in the Labour Party in Scotland. The atmosphere of the Clyde in the early 20th century was in large part its creation. In When the Clyde Ran Red, Maggie Craig quotes an article published in the Times just after the 1922 election ...”

“... black and white like a bovine zebra. It’s a delightful object, a convict cow, and could she be bothered to make more and market them I’m sure they would sell for a substantial price. As it is, it stands on the kitchen table waiting to find its – or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was ...”

“... of American identity, as Baldwin put it, has given rise to endless attempts at definition, by foreign observers as well as Americans. The French film critic Serge Daney, who loved America’s cinema as much as he despised its imperialism, called it ‘the place that makes it possible to dream, but also the corner of reality that dreams crash ...”

“... yourself, and you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific, said he was the greatest soldier in American history. Never much regarded in Britain, he is still recalled with loathing in Australia. When Americans remember him, it is with something close ...”

“... one murder than 600,000 – the number murdered in the Armenian atrocities of 1916-17 or by Nazi Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front in 1941 before the death camps were fully geared up – or five to six million, the best estimates we have of the number of Jews murdered in the camps. At a purely cognitive level, any number can ...”

“... father of Greek medicine than to Greek root-gatherers. ‘From Hippocrates to Biomedicine’ might be its working title: a world-historical tale of how ‘Western medicine’ broke with the ‘traditional wisdom of the body’ and became global. The scope and chronology of the first narrative are also more or less traditional: eighty pages take us from the end ...”

“... By the time I was twenty I was living in a slum house in Sheffield. I had a husband and no money; those things I could explain. I had a pain which I could not explain; it seemed to wander about my body, nibbling here, stabbing there, flitting every time I tried to put my finger on it.When I packed my bags for London, at 18 years old, I went to live in a women’s hall of residence in Bloomsbury ...”

“... By the time I worked out the style of our death the leaves were back on the trees. The journey in search of rubbish had taken the whole winter long and now I was here with the bins. The evening it was all over I emptied the latest rubbish onto some newspapers spread out on the kitchen floor – a cornflakes packet and old razor blades, apple cores and cotton buds ...”

“... with only a certain doggedness about her actions an indication of her gender. One or two passers-by look twice and a neighbour posting a letter stops to talk – and what enables him to break the ice is that she is a woman doing a man’s job. 8 January. By train to Cambridge on a day of blinding sunshine and bitter ...”