“... genteel compilations typical of the history of British art in the decades after the Second World War. I was particularly struck by Waterhouse’s concern with the pedigrees of the painters he discussed, men like Thomas Jones, Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good ...”

“... the abolition of the Caliphate following the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. A degree of order was effectively restored to it by intelligent nationalist movements which, once in power, promoted a ‘national Islam’, the better to subject religion to raison d’état and curb its more dangerous and sectarian enthusiasms. During the ...”

“... For four decades​ El Salvador was known for death squads and civil war, and then for gang violence. But now, under President Nayib Bukele, the gangs that carved up the country have been routed. The members of the pandillas – the two main gangs were Mara Salvatrucha (or MS-13) and Barrio 18 (split into two factions, the Revolucionarios and Sureños) – have been imprisoned or have scattered ...”

“... authority. The ‘in’ period in historical writing just now seems to be the period of the post-war Labour Government. In fiction, the Second World War novel still has a long way to run. Every British novelist born since 1930 seems to find it necessary to write one. Most writers now use historical and documentary sources ...”

“... framework for everything that followed was set by Attlee: he was the one who had to face the Cold War, who authorised the building of a British atom bomb and drew up detailed preparations for World War Three. The Chiefs of Staff, fearing an imminent Soviet attack, threatened their collective resignation in order to force ...”

“... riding a horse called Proletarian Strength travels around with his Sancho Panza during the Civil War, observing the bizarre efforts of various isolated idealists to make a new revolutionary life. The novella Vprok (For Future Benefit) applied a similar approach to collectivisation. The Foundation Pit, never published in Platonov’s lifetime because of the ...”

“... like tens of thousands of other families, were nearly a year into a bewildering, unnatural war. Mobilised troops struggled to work out where they were, never mind what they were doing or why. Robert Rodway was 28, but many of his fellow soldiers in the Westminster Red Regiment were much younger, just apprentices. None had fought before; only a few in ...”

“... to it – indeed its existence was first exposed to the world by the publication of Djilas’s New Class in 1956. The fullest account of the phenomenon in the Soviet Union is contained in Michael Voslensky’s Nomenklatura (1984). This shows how the privileged – by rank and, increasingly, by birth – are sealed off from the many intractable problems of ...”

“... York, Norwich, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool have all taken a turn. Since the First World War, Birmingham has generally been considered the UK’s second city. It became the second most populous city in England in 1911, and in Britain forty years later, overtaking Glasgow. Today, some believe the title should go to Manchester, even though ...”

“... himself as being ‘très fatiguë’ the result, he said, of a long period as a prisoner of war in Germany. He had passed the competitive examination for entrance to the Ecole in 1939, having prepared the concours in the khâgne at Lyons, where he had been the student of Jean Lacroix (who has recently retired as the philosophy correspondent of Le Monde ...”

“... removal from Nazism to England and final ascent towards Cambridge, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. Touching portraits of his parents – hapless English father and fragile Austrian mother, both dead by the time he was 14 – sketch one psychological background; Jewish descent on both sides in the most anti-semitic city in Europe, another. He explains the ...”

“... uninterested in all the things men like, such as sport, business, statistics, debates, speeches, war and the weather; but I am riveted by lust, bibelots, furniture and glamour, society and jewels.In November 1947, Channon dined with Somerset Maugham. ‘We discussed diaries and Willie Maugham volunteered that mine, if I presented them, would be the most ...”

“... conscience; they may have admitted on occasions that there were things of genuine value in working-class culture; they may even have recognised that middle-class culture had its faults and upper-class culture its failings. But the fact remains that most of them preferred the opera to the ...”

“... generally a sympathetic biographer, suggests that the journal was ‘an expression of middle-class vanity’, the product of someone ‘with an unshakeable belief in his own historical destiny’. Cardew was by all accounts a charismatic figure, but in the 1970s, at the height of his messianic Maoism, his self-belief had begun to evaporate. His life ...”

“... religion, sexual anxiety (or indeed helplessness), a heightened sensitivity to the complexities of class privilege and to the ruthless depredations of the economic system’, sensitivities he passed on to many of his characters. (Grace Melbury, in The Woodlanders, combines ‘modern nerves with primitive emotions’.)While Baudelaire’s ideal artist quickens ...”