“... Synge’s origin was solidly Anglo-Irish, Protestant, upper-middle class: his father a well-got barrister, his mother the daughter of a Protestant parson in Schull, County Cork. Presumably it was a financial blow when his father died, but Synge was too young to feel a difference, and besides there was enough money coming from rented estates in Wicklow ...”

“... of slaves were required to bowl at the young sons of slaveowners, but the bowlers – the servant class – began to practise batting and got quite good at it. When formal organisation began, the structure of West Indian society – or of its various societies – was closely reproduced in the clubs and boards of control that ran cricket in the Caribbean, a ...”

“... Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the Thirties and Stalin’s Ambassador to Washington after the war. John Carswell is the son of Catherine Carswell, who was Ivy’s best friend until she followed her husband to Russia in 1920. In 1959, after Catherine and Litvinov were dead, Ivy got permission to visit her native land and turned up on John Carswell’s ...”

“... his cronies with infusing British society with a tyrannical spirit. The government had declared war on its people, Knox claimed, and the front lines were everywhere: in newspapers, pulpits, taverns, the ‘sequestered walks of private life’. Coffee houses, famous for political gossip, were particularly suspect. In November 1792, John Frost, a leading ...”

“... of Hillary Clinton and her exceptionalist allies. For people like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, war is a desirable state of affairs, especially when viewed from the comfort of their keyboards, and the rest of the world – apart from a few bad guys – is filled with populations who want to build societies just like ours: pluralistic, democratic and open ...”

“... subject: the tangled but ordinary enough private lives of a fairly undistinguished upper-middle-class family, loosely based on her own, between the 1930s and 1950s. The Cazalet family money comes from importing timber (as the Howard family money did). Three sons, Hugh, Edward and Rupert, follow into the business after their father, who is called the Brig ...”

“... point). It has no national dress, nor any evident national icons in the tartan/leeks/thistles class. St George’s Day attracts no celebrations. It does have a national flag, but not everyone knows what it is. A football commentator remarked that he was pleased to see ‘nearly as many’ St George’s Crosses being waved as Union Jacks, when England ...”

“... is a solitary activity. A play is a public event where, all too often these days, for the middle-class playgoer, embarrassment rules, oh dear. Especially where Osborne is concerned. Nor does reading his book carry with it the occupational hazards of seeing his plays, such as finding the redoubtable Lady Redgrave looming over one ready to box one’s ears, as ...”

“... by a different kind of machine, one which had served caste, kings and God for centuries. A lower-class clockmaker was at most upper-case Trade. Besides, Beaumarchais never showed the slightest interest in the mysteries of the Universe, nor did he worry much about God. He was far more interested in money, and in winning. He was given some schooling but at 13 ...”

“... In the years leading up to the American Revolution and well beyond the War of 1812 Americans living in the New York area made no secret of their allegiance to England. New York’s aristocratic sympathy – cultural, commercial and religious – was not shared in Massachusetts, the home of a growing Irish population and of the Boston Tea Party ...”

“... In July​ 1917, shortly after his arrival at Craiglockhart War Hospital for neurasthenic officers on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Wilfred Owen drafted the first of the five poems published during his lifetime. ‘Sing me at dawn,’ it exclaims,                             but only with your laugh:Like sprightly Spring that laugheth into leaf;Like Love, that cannot flute for smiling at Life ...”

“... reach of their understanding. Prentis regularly goes to a mental hospital to visit his father, a war hero he can get close to only by reading his book about his wartime exploits. The father ‘is not insane’, Prentis tells us, he just has, ‘like people in ordinary hospitals, some particular thing or other wrong with him’. His father’s particular ...”

“... is part of the so-called South Bay, south of Santa Monica. It was mostly populated by middle-class white people when I grew up there in the 1950s, and was a good place in many ways. I played volleyball on the beach, and once a year we had surfing, paddleboard and volleyball championships next to the Manhattan Pier. I graduated from the local high ...”

“... she kept of her experiences on her estate in the Val d’Orcia in Tuscany during the Second World War. Everything in her life and writing was inflected by her relationship with the idea of Italy and its past (of course it was not always one ‘Italy’), as well as with the actual 20th-century country where she mostly lived. And yet she wrote in her first ...”

“... The catastrophe​ of the First World War was, for many women, ‘pure liberation’. The words are those of the novelist E.M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady was the ancestor of Bridget Jones. There was a sense of relief at emerging into a world from which the constraints of the Edwardian age had been blown away ...”