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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... school isn’t like that,’ they’re off the hook. 20 February. We’re gradually assembling a class: James Corden, who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... novels, set in the first half of the present century and significantly concerned with world war, its origins and aftermath. Garden, Ashes and Star Turn, though unlike in most other respects, share a preoccupation with the Holocaust. Danilo Kis’s novel is a lament for the passing of the Central European petty bourgeoisie. In one scene a Jewish ...”

“... her father, a conservative member of the Duma, could be said of all the ‘decent’ people of her class: ‘he never rid himself of a certain scepticism, an unwillingness to fight for an issue if he wasn’t absolutely certain that his viewpoint would prevail. The fact is, he wasn’t a fighter.’ In the sudden, peaceful disintegration of the regime in ...”

“... top of the building, in the room where Ken Currie’s controversial Rivera-style murals of working-class history can be seen around the ceiling: but the speeches were made in the Winter Garden downstairs, where heavy rain dripping through the glass roof and a chill which gnawed one’s bowels did not dismay the two hundred people who had gathered to honour the ...”

“... grown up in Missouri and attended the state university, then gone on to a clerical job during the war. He married Helen Robson, borrowed some money from her lawyer-banker father, then opened his Ben Franklin ‘variety store’. The life-changing pair of panties appeared in a list of goods sold by a garment-industry middleman in New York. The pants were ...”

“... genius, one third blackguard and one third lunatic’), into documentation from the Spanish Civil War, and into the partly unsorted mountain of Koestler papers at Edinburgh University, which holds his correspondence with hundreds of often famous friends and antagonists throughout the world. Scammell seems to have interviewed almost every surviving human being ...”

“... sympathy that social harmony required. They would display the impartiality that transcends class and sectarian interest. ‘The ideal of a Liberal party,’ said Robert Lowe in 1877, ‘consists in a view of things undisturbed and undistorted by the promptings of interest or prejudice, in a complete independence of all ...”

“... before advancing towards socialism. This emphasis on the simultaneity of the national and the class struggle avoids the strategic question of alliances and priorities. If national liberation is accorded priority, then alliances between democratic forces and the anti-Apartheid capitalists become feasible and even promising. If, on the other hand, ...”

“... puzzle’. He continued to defend the controversial thesis of The Origins of the Second World War, and to be hurt and irritated by those who imagined that this book was an apology for Hitler. But the letters suggest that he viewed The Origins as increasingly unimportant, as the cutting edge of new historical research shifted away from the Anglo-German ...”