“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... different world’. That world was Whitaker’s own: provincial, northern, working or lower-middle class. Born Marjorie Olive Taylor in 1895 on the outskirts of Bradford, Whitaker was the eighth of eleven children. (She was later known as the ‘Bradford Chekhov’.) Her father, a bookbinder, was her earliest patron and critic. He paid sixpence for her first ...”

“... avert mass deaths. The final episode of British colonial starvation, again in Bengal, during World War Two, killed three million people and hastened the end of the empire. Faced with the Japanese occupation of Burma, the British Army took control of food supplies and confiscated fishing boats – fearing that they would be seized for a seaborne invasion ...”

“... the latter category although the credentials are the same: you have to be loathed by a particular class, group, religion or nation, and you have to represent a cause which your opponents do not acknowledge. In the Middle East, for example, Moammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini himself have been demonised. Gaddafi (Arab unity, Arab freedom ...”

“... the Irish Parliamentary party did where to find him). The man who had roused Ireland for the Land War with quasi-insurrectionary rhetoric was in the 1880s to stand conspicuously aloof from the Plan of Campaign, enter into relations approaching cosiness with Gladstonian Liberalism, and conduct the political business of the nascent Irish nation mostly from the ...”

“... Ayatollah Khomeini. As late as 1974, when I first visited Iran, not merely the Court and officer class but a great number of townspeople were openly impatient with religion. Islam in its Iranian version, known as Shi‘a Islam, reeked to them of feudalism, passivity, poverty, the past, the previous dynasty, the bazaar and the provinces and what the Shah in a ...”

“... own – if only because ‘in’ the family was hardly a figure of speech. Until the First World War, the event almost invariably took place at home. And until the later decades of the century, Jalland argues, it typically took place in a climate of religious belief that made all the difference not only to the dying but to those left behind.Thanks to the ...”

“... added . . . geometry and trigonometry, chemistry, rhetoric, evidences of Christianity, and a class in the US Constitution. Electives included piano, guitar, drawing and painting. As if that weren’t enough to handle, college life presented a set of unique social challenges. Peril quotes from student handbooks and etiquette guides, whose tone of cheery ...”

“... the Cuban missile crisis. Suddenly two newsworthy people were involved in making the decision for war or peace (‘an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation’). And within less than a week it was all over, and the squall of fear which had rushed over the horizon had safely passed. The gas masks were put away and the digging of trenches stopped. A good civilian ...”

“... might have shaken his head, on the other hand, and regretted that those who were young and hated war should have to die ‘when cruel old campaigners win safe through’. Epitaphs apart, what will survive of Graham Greene? Not love, certainly; nor the famously tortured guerrilla of Roman Catholicism, fighting and writing for and against the Church from ...”