“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... England. Balzac’s great successor, for Lukács, was the towering figure of Tolstoy, whose War and Peace represents a peak simultaneously of the historical and of the realist novel in the 19th century. In societies more advanced than Russia, on the other hand, the development of capitalism had by this time pitted a revolutionary working ...”

“... and were still talking about starting on a similar plan for Bohemia when the First World War started. As Heribert Adam says, the success of apower-sharing system of this sort depends on the members of each ethnic group wanting to identify themselves through a group consensus. That is true, more or less, of the Afrikaners. The first part of Ethnic ...”

“... those bits not occupied by houses, quarries, roads and railway tracks – was owned by the War Office, which had appreciated the peninsula’s strategic significance since early in the 20th century, when Germany emerged as a threat to British naval supremacy and a local hilltop was equipped with big guns pointing towards the North Sea. By the time of ...”

“... what his companion talked about. He was interested and expert in everything around him – the war, Buddhist religion and art, the geological specimens he would retrieve from every ditch, the properties of mud, luminous insects, the ancestry of cycads, but his recurrent theme was the fundamentals of biology and of the enormous developments just becoming ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in social history as an impressive statistic: one family in 20 still lives in this kind of inter-war council housing. Homes fit for Heroes tells how they came to be built, and why they took the form they did, but Dr Swenarton also intends to ‘contribute to our understanding of design in general and especially of its relation to ideology and the ...”

“... relief for unemployed intellectuals’, and it was given to Orwell during the early war years when from August 1941 to November 1943 he was paid £650 a year as a talks producer in the Indian Section of the Far Eastern Service. He was hired as Eric Blair, but those who brought him in were clearly signing up George Orwell, author of Burmese ...”