“... 2020), though recent economic setbacks suggest, as with similar predictions about India, that this may prove to be fantasy. Wealth has brought disconcerting changes: large parts of Sumatra, ravaged by slash-and-burn investors, resemble a lunar landscape, and smoke from land-clearing fires started by palm-oil prospectors extends as far as the cities of Malaysia ...”

“... are left alone with our day, and the time is short and           History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.These last lines from his great poem about the Spanish Civil War, he later decided, sought ‘to equate goodness with success’, which is not remotely true unless you choose to presuppose some providential tendency to ...”

“... reels off the names of the several Parmesans that they stock, ending up with a flourish: ‘Or you may like to try the Reggiano, the Rolls Royce of Parmesans.’ 8 May. Much in the papers about VE Day, today the 60th anniversary. Several people who were in the crowd outside Buckingham Palace remember how they chanted: ‘We ...”

“... had left him, bleached, blanched and inert.The two couples fell out, but not before Lawrence may have put some of Mansfield’s early erotic experiences into The Rainbow and Women in Love: Mansfield liked to shock people by talking about her sexual experiences with both men and women, and Harman suspects that the scene in The Rainbow of Ursula and ...”

“... the world stood by while the occupation killed our sons.’The failure of these tactics may well have resulted in Operation al-Aqsa Flood. The attack launched on 7 October followed the bloodiest period of settler violence in the West Bank in years. Israeli intelligence claims to have discovered documents showing that Hamas began planning a ‘big ...”

“... always keen, and is often passed on to the second generation.’ But he is also conscious that he may himself embody a sweeping moment in history. He draws on Eric Hobsbawm, who recognised that this change – ‘the death of the peasantry’ – is ‘perhaps the most fundamental one the contemporary modern world has seen’. Joyce thinks of himself as a ...”

“... a pledge in the Tory Party manifesto to hold an in-out referendum on membership of the EU. But he may have done so in the belief that it wouldn’t be needed because he was unlikely to win an overall majority and the commitment could be bargained away in another coalition deal with the Lib Dems. When he did win a majority he was caught. General elections are ...”

“... death was given as ‘heart failure’: Mandelstam did suffer from a heart complaint, though he may in fact have died of typhus. His widow reports the way in which she was given the news: I was sent a notice asking me to go to the post office at Nikita Gate. Here I was handed back the parcel I had sent to M. in the camp. ‘The addressee is dead,’ the ...”

“... for the traditional rivalry of self-esteem between physicians and surgeons, as I suppose it may have been for the apostasy that made old Dr Thomas give up medicine for surgery. Therapeutic nihilism, says Lewis, was a ‘reaction to the kind of medicine taught and practised in the early part of the 19th century, when anything that happened to pop into ...”

“... its dramas not at the pithead or the factory gate but at the Rover’s Return. Improbable as it may now seem, the North in the Sixties – anyway the early Sixties, when Harold Wilson made his appearance as the great iconoclast, when the Mersey Sound first captured the nation’s record-players and when Z-Cars put Liverpool in the front line of ...”

“... Michael Flood, Frederick Saxby, Valentine Fane, Griffiths Davies and so on: there were many – may yet turn out to be comrades from the trenches, those other persons he so loved. Although writing of place-names rather than people, P.J. Kavanagh puts the matter exactly in the introduction to his wonderful Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney (1982): ‘Like most ...”

“... final pages of Patriots that ‘the United Kingdom will survive for a long time to come’ – it may even last another century. This involves writing off a lot of British history – and British self-imagining of whatever kind – as a postscript. Both Weight and Nairn take it for granted that only the stubbornness of the ruling class is holding the state ...”

“... suspicion reached a climax in any conversation, and there were many, about mixed marriages. ‘You may find a nice shiksa and fall in love with her. Not all goyim are coarse. Many of them are truly refined, and you may marry one and live happily together for years. But someday, when you least expect it, the two of you will ...”

“... you a new image, downloaded and printed from the Internet. It is an image of Robert Thompson as he may look now. Vengeance is evergreen, and the regulars know the image by heart and they watch the door.I don’t mean to marshal these thoughts, as Johnson said, into a school and call it an academy, but I believe people in Britain experienced an entanglement ...”

“... Sanskrit manuscript (from which the novel has been ‘translated’)? Or perhaps it may be permitted to note the astonishing simultaneity of the beginning of his literary career with the so-called Bogotazo, the assassination in 1948 of the great populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (and the beginning of the seventy-year long Violencia in ...”