“... the bureaucrat’s recording instinct of a Pepys. Only once, during the dark years of the Great War, did he turn the scrutiny of his art, like Virginia Woolf, upon himself. In January 1917 he started a detailed journal of his life at Ayot St Lawrence with his wife Charlotte. On 9 January he had to record a difference between them. He tried to amuse ...”

“... and on the wrong side of the counter. The portrayal of the department store as a hotbed of sex and class-consciousness anticipates the English Edwardian novelists, but this is also a study in the pathology of obsessive love, a love which is a kind of enslavement and forces the sufferer to react in entirely predictable ways. Wokulski, an intelligent and ...”

“... come into the story at all. They drank a lot, as did many Southern gentlemen after the Civil War. It isn’t difficult to connect drink with defeat, but James Fox thinks that the cult of the belle also was the result of defeat: ‘The belles became the pure white maidens of Provençal romance, antidotes to the surrounding blackness, whose honour ...”

“... long interval he became an assiduous and effective reviewer of other people’s novels. Then the war uncorked him, spilling out the fantasy of recall that became the Eustace and Hilda trilogy. Simonetta Perkins takes place in Venice, the city that Hartley fell in love with and, during the Thirties, lived in for months at a time. A well brought up young ...”

“... In the summer​ of 1992, I took a ‘luxury cab’ from Damascus to Amman. The cab’s class was important: luxury cabs provided extra services at the border crossing, helping to circumvent the humiliations reserved for Syrian men every time they left the country. When we reached the Syrian border, the driver got out and promised to get my documents stamped in five minutes ...”

“... well as senators and generals, but in all cases the emphasis is on the concern of the Roman upper class to stress the exemplary and spectacular nature of such deaths. Spectacle had always been a part of Roman valour: in war, both the ritual act of devotio – in which a military leader sacrifices his life to the gods in ...”

“... wanted but seldom got – it is clear that Lennon and the Beatles transformed the face of post-war popular music, establishing a new sort of audience, pioneering the stereo LP as a new form, and introducing avant-garde material into the mainstream of what had been a limited and conservative genre. If Lennon had done nothing after Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely ...”

“... by epidemics, wars of pacification, forced labour, increased taxes and rent, conscription for war service and a sharp drop in population as well as by higher incomes for some, more consumer goods and the introduction of schools and hospitals.’ Nabudere supplies a wonderfully revealing 19th-century quotation to show British church and business interests ...”

“... Major’s words, ‘completed its journey from backroom tavern to sumptuous palace, from working class to middle class, from foundry, pit and dock to drawing room, salon and theatre’. Not many former Tory leaders can produce chunks of sociology like that. Margaret Thatcher might have found it politically unsound. There ...”

“... the 20th century as one of the hubs of Asian communism, and in the decades after the Second World War, all the century’s ideologies made an appearance there. A onetime Fabian, Lee Kuan Yew modelled Singapore’s postwar welfare state and housing system partly on Attlee’s Britain, of which it became a hyperbolic version (the Singaporean government today ...”

“... of ‘vaccine passports’, and noting that she had just appeared on Steve Bannon’s hard-right War Room webcast. ‘Look, I’m a progressive Democrat,’ Wolf said. ‘I would be delighted to be talking to CNN and MSNBC and publishing in the New York Times like I used to, but those are not the platforms that are calling me, they aren’t the ones who want ...”

“... creeping aggression in the north. Army recruits were given lectures on ‘The Coming Sino-Japanese War’ and ‘How to Make Sacrifices’. Not everyone shared the enthusiasm. Children at a school in Jiangsu who were too poor to buy their textbooks complained that they would have to ‘sell their bodies to the pawnshop’ to raise the cash. College students in ...”

“... US was still singling out his term in office as ‘the most fruitful and productive in the post-war years’. This upside to the Nixon picture is much to the fore in Aitken’s adoring biography. It is a strange coming-together: Aitken, the hereditary Tory, born with a large silver spoon in his mouth, and the lower-...”

“... can be defined as a thin-skinned humanism for enlightened and sensitive members of the capitalist class who do not desire the outer world to be such as might be prone to cause them any displeasing impression.’ And much more in that vein. Virginia Woolf, all the same, picked up some displeasing impressions about the future of this man whose mind she ...”

“... grandfather built ships for the Nazis. My mother, who was born in 1937, told us stories about the war at bedtime. She used to argue with my brother about the degree of her father’s complicity. Part of the heat of these arguments came from the fact that our father is Jewish, from New York, and his family gave him hell for marrying a Christian from ...”