“... rural Georgia and through hard work and self-discipline managed to join Atlanta’s Black middle class. The elder King established strong connections with the city’s white power brokers – so strong, in fact, that even while speaking out against racism he urged parishioners, including the ten-year-old Martin, dressed as a slave, to take part in a gala ...”

“... enterprise, whose life often seems little more than an endless round of state dinners and high-class shopping. In the end, Perry does as well as any biographer can with a woman who kept her inner life sealed off from scrutiny. Indeed her preoccupation with surfaces may have been her deepest trait. Joe and Rose Kennedy led separate lives: he pursued ...”

“... there is a resurgence of interest in his work. Five of his novels, two memoirs of the First World War and his collected verse have been reprinted, and his native townland, Glenties in County Donegal, has an annual Patrick MacGill Festival. Writers are now commemorated as often as saints used to be and, like saints, they fall into the categories of the local ...”

“... founded in the sixth century and destroyed in a German advance in the opening phase of the war. A few window arches and pillars survive. Some of the rubble was used to make a watchtower in what was the nave so that German soldiers had a better view of French troop positions outside Verdun. ‘Do something beautiful,’ Paul Cret, chair of the steering ...”

“... Uzodinma Iweala’s short, intense and ambitious first novel, is a rebel soldier in a civil war in an anonymous African country. He has no sense of the cause he is fighting for, or even who his leaders are, beyond his immediate superiors, men he knows only as Commandant and Luftenant. He spends his days ‘walking and fighting and soldiering and ...”

“... In​ David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories. They obey the polls religiously, yet still the voters aren’t ‘churning ...”

“... been able to find common ground in nostalgia for the solidarities of the old inner-city working-class community. The most grandiloquent expressions of this nostalgia have come from those identified with the Left: Jeremy Seabrook’s interpretation of looting as ‘the loss of morality in these poor, proud, stoical working communities’ (Guardian, 20 ...”

“... they cannot be expected to scrutinise from day to day, are those of standardly-educated middle-class people with an interest in the arts. Shaw has no quarrel with them on this score, and spends quite a lot of time in this book defending establishment valuations. However, he also thinks that the best should be made available to sections of the population ...”

“... out of which the tragedy grew. Yad Vashem begins with a room: a full-scale model of a middle-class German-Jewish parlour from between the wars. Visitors can look in through the cut-away wall and see shelves of books, a piano, reproductions of high art. A sign explains that German Jews thought that they could become part of the dominant culture by ...”

“... heart condition, the President made key decisions that affected the conduct of the world war and the shape of the postwar world; these were the men who advised him. Have the Sun and the National Enquirer, uninvited guests at the party, spoiled the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s death? Secret Affairs (the story of ...”

“... but these were replaced with berths, and she spent her first few years carrying troops to the Boer War. In 1900 she carried the entire Dublin – Denbigh Imperial Yeomanry, along with their many horses, to the South African coast. The ship was later brought into service on the Beaver Line, a company of ships sailing between England and the prosperous shores of ...”

“... emotionally wrenching work earned them the praise of their comrades as ‘heroes’ of the Civil War. They had originally been brought to France from rural China during the Great War to serve as trench-diggers or to fill in at factories whose regular workforce was at the front, so were used to hard manual labour. Well over ...”

“... movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe. ‘The true test of a good government,’ Alexander Hamilton wrote, ‘is its aptitude and tendency to produce a ...”

“... by dull professionals, and prided themselves on exclusivity and unsociability. During the war, academics had been forced to emerge from their burrows in the Royal Society and the British Academy and contribute to national policymaking, but now they preferred to nap in the library of the Athenaeum. Sampson was so convinced by his argument that he ...”

“... tasters, but a beautiful pleasure dome filled with works of art connected with wine. During the war he spent eight months in a French military prison in Algiers, returned to France, then escaped on foot across the Pyrenees, joined the Free French forces in England and landed in Normandy just as his elegant first wife was being ‘dragged from her plank bed ...”