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“... married life had promised, and partly, Herzog suggests, because of the instinctive cupidity of her class, pursues him through the courts until he’s all but penniless. For all that Herzog accuses her of being out of touch with reality, her litigious skill far surpasses his. On the back flap of Michael Hofmann’s new edition, My First Wife is pitched as ‘a ...”

“... Administration, with an obligation to prevent political patronage – the curse of the Civil War pension scheme – as well as to protect the scheme’s financial viability and to propose improvements. The existence of the SSA has limited the erosion of public pensions in the United States; in Britain, there is no such independent body. Blackburn is ...”

“... of what she dimly recalled writing to her husband while he was at the Front in the First World War and was assembled from working-class epistolary Lego: ‘Hoping this finds you as it leaves me’ etc.My grandfather committed suicide in 1957. A dour, uncommunicative man, reputedly with a violent temper in early life, his ...”

“... Robert Chandler writes: ‘Life and Fate is the true War and Peace of this century, the most complete portrait of Stalinist Russia that we have or are ever likely to have.’ Chandler, who has had the herculean task of making a good translation of this long, moving and very remarkable novel, puts forward that claim in his Introduction ...”

“... chose to be revealed. His only other publications had been fifty years earlier: Ballads of World War Two, collected and sometimes also written by himself, in 1947, and Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (1948). This last, honouring the soldier victims of desert war, ‘our own and the others’ as his dedication put ...”

“... a growing realisation that partition is not the problem, but a symptom of the problem; that the war is not the British versus ‘the Northern Irish people’ (that convenient Noraid rationalisation), but one Northern Irish people against another; and that, looked at from Dublin, neither of these ‘Northern Irish peoples’ has much discernible affinity ...”

“... blows and hold things together – or rather, they are the most eminent of them, for had the class not been a relatively large one, the process of disintegration would certainly have been more rapid and more painful than it has been. Lord Redcliffe-Maud possesses, in an outstanding degree, the qualities necessary for success in this field and his success ...”

“... funny. Unlike the people who can’t glimpse a Nancy Mitford novel without moralising about class, jeunesses dorées and the demerits of froth, Nancy – who was nearly, non-U-ly, called Ruby, and whose family weren’t nearly as thick or rich as they’re supposed to have been – didn’t lecture, and didn’t much mind about anything. There were ...”

“... two generations. Mack Smith has chosen to update it at a propitious moment, now that the Cold War is over and the political parties that governed Italy for the last half-century have been swept from power. As a result, it is possible to see the broad outlines of the postwar period as a distinct historical epoch and to think about contemporary Italy in the ...”

“... by increasing demands on the work-force made by a country beginning to arm itself for the coming war, had many thousands of unskilled jobs awaiting workers in such labour-intensive operations as cleaning and domestic services, the Post Office and the large mail-order retailing-houses. If the black migration had conformed to the pattern set (if only in the ...”

“... in the French Resistance. Each was a lie. The ‘Duke’ was in fact a Jew from an affluent middle-class family: he had been kicked out of a series of decreasingly respectable prep schools (none of them Groton), flunked out of the University of Miami (not Yale, not even Dartmouth) and never served in the military at all. Bluff, good-looking, immaculately and ...”

“... the appearance, and actually more than that, the conviction, of realism. Before World War One he was a radical socialist. He dropped that for muckraking journalism. Then he shifted to liberalism, to pragmatism (whose philosophical elements he had picked up while studying under William James), and then finally to national prominence as a pundit who ...”

“... threatened to resign rather than fight their Ulster countrymen in the UVF. Mutiny and civil war were widely feared – though it was unclear who would be fighting whom – before a much greater crisis, the First World War, diverted attention. When Home Rule was at last placed on the statute book in September 1914, its ...”

“... off the main road into smaller streets, until he is sure nobody is behind us. Jadriyah, a middle-class neighbourhood built on a large loop in the Tigris, is one of the safer parts of Baghdad. When it is warm enough to sit outside in the evenings, families eat kebabs and drink tea in makeshift restaurants beside the main road. But things are changing. Last ...”

“... Jean and while Lys was still married to Ian)? Was Barbara Skelton having an affair with the Polish war artist Feliks Topolski when Peter Quennell came onto the scene, still married to his third wife, Glur, but making Topolski so jealous that the men resorted to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made Janetta, still married to Hugh Slater, fall in love with Kenneth ...”