“... In Theory of War, Joan Brady reveals a little-known piece of American history that has dominated her own life. In the chaos after the Civil War, white children, the sons and daughters of impoverished widows, of ragged soldiers, were sold into virtual slavery. Black slaves – who had been expensive – had just been liberated ...”

“... superlative consumer of his own propaganda. Whether Henry’s subjects shared his affection for war is, as Steven Gunn’s book shows, less certain. War was, however, central to the English experience, both in the practical sense that armies were sent frequently into battle, but also in the more amorphous sense that ...”

“... Rugby and boxing were frowned on by the chapels, but expanded to provide grounds for working-class self-esteem and hero worship. The chapels plugged teetotalism and the closure or banning of public houses. The working-class clubs expanded to provide opportunities for drink and drunkenness, which were particularly ...”

“... but ‘my domestic help is unreachable.’ Estrangement would seem to be the essence of middle-class Afrikaans life; poverty, misery, superstition, violence and an iron sexual puritanism are presented as the lot of the rural poor. E. Kotzé (‘Day of Blood’), Hennie Aucamp (‘For Four Voices’) and Pirow Becker (‘Under a Shepherd’s Tree’) offer ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... eloquence all the more arresting. Johnston’s diplomatic duties took him to Japan before the war. After Pearl Harbour he was interned for eight months. After being released in an exchange of diplomatic agents, he was sent to the Middle East. After the war there were various other appointments before he took up his post ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... constituted if not quite by a ‘country’, then by the efforts of a particular political class to exert its influence over one.By Bowen’s account, there was no shortage of atmosphere in the Anglo-Irish Big House. Each member of these isolated households was ‘bound up’, as she put it in the book she wrote about her own, ‘not only in the ...”

“... 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 ...”