“... rehearse the privileges of working for superior families before 1914; ‘surplus’ women with war experience live together in practical and possibly more intimate arrangements; middle-aged village stalwarts organise bring-and-buy sales and fundraisers for the Conservatives, haggle over the flower-arranging in church and fuss over the curates.Not all are ...”

“... change. African writers seemed to be more interested in writing novels that reflected their middle-class lives and concerns. Adichie grew up on a university campus: her father was a professor of statistics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and her mother was its first female registrar. These writers didn’t ignore politics: Adichie’s first novel, Purple ...”

“... singles out ‘Leavisites’ as the chief culprits. Leavis himself could certainly be a world-class sniper and caviller, but when, having read this biography, I returned to some of his celebrated pronunciamentos about Spender, it was impossible not to recognise, amid a good deal of exaggeration and unfairness, the aptness of some of his main ...”

“... died. Schwieger’s unexpected success electrified the world, despite the fact that the European war had already been raging for nine months. Shock and horror swept through Allied and neutral nations alike. In New York City, the composer Charles Ives observed that passengers waiting for the ‘El’ train spontaneously began to sing the Gospel song ‘In the ...”

“... sitting amiably in front of shelves of books, rumpled and smoking a pipe. Many Japanese of the war generation would have no trouble understanding the reasons for the fanfare. Kiyosawa, a journalist, was consistent in his criticism of Japan’s military Government throughout the Second World War, and never succumbed to ...”

“... Mall Gazette, could pay six shillings to entrepreneurial jailers for a private cell and a ‘first-class’ stay. (‘Never had I a pleasanter holiday, a more charming season of repose,’ Stead wrote of his incarceration in 1885, after he had ‘purchased’ a 13-year-old girl as part of an exposé of child prostitution.) At Newgate Gaol, established in the ...”

“... despite their omnipresence in the landscape. For much of the Golden Age, the Dutch were at war, but very little violence ever made it into their pictures, though soldiers are shown in guardrooms and brothels, as well as domestic settings. In domestic scenes, perhaps the most conspicuous absence is the man of the house, who is often signified by a ...”

“... discomfort. Born in Bucharest, Weber was sent to school in England, served in the Second World War as a captain in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and in the course of his service spent the mid-1940s in India, after earlier stints in Belgium and Germany. Demobilised in 1947, he went to Cambridge, and devoted the rest of his life to history, mostly ...”

“... with whom he frequently collaborated. Carr began to write his History just after the Second World War, when the Soviet Union appeared in something of a heroic light. The origins of the Stalinist colossus were of very wide interest. The Bolsheviks could well be said to have brought off a miracle. In the First World ...”

“... discuss public figures with assuredness: he saw Chamberlain as ‘a statesman quite in the second class; an engineer, not an architect – full of small ingenuity and cleverness, but quite unable to take a synoptic view of things; he has never really emerged from Birmingham and the tin-tacks that made him.’ Such a style makes a deeply-felt religious ...”

“... and Melton Prior (1845-1910), who brought home trophies and weapons from the places he visited as war correspondent for the Illustrated London News. But many of the masks, totems and costumes found their original use in ceremonies and festivals which, one realises looking at them here, are not so very far from pier-end entertainments. The Museum stands as ...”

“... and abstract.His summa is F-111 (1964-65), a history painting of the US during the Vietnam War. Named after a fighter jet developed at colossal expense, this immense (86-foot long) painting surrounds the viewer with its dark dreams. Along the body of the jet Rosenquist introduces images: wallpaper, a tyre, a cake, a light bulb, an umbrella, an atomic ...”

“... organiser of the October seizure of power, charismatic leader of the Red Army during the Civil War – seemed a man for the ages, one of the great figures of the 20th century. Trotsky’s vilification by Stalin was part of the epic. It started in the 1920s with a succession struggle in which Trotsky, the most famous man in Russia after Lenin, was one major ...”

“... when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century.’ It is, perhaps, a curious notion that there could be any time when it would be ‘a good thing’ for a country to experience a racking political scandal which, over a 12-year period, led to the ...”

“... back into the night. The countryside became caught up in a bitter and increasingly vicious war, of which he was the leading orchestrator on the Irish side. On the evening before Guy Fawkes in 1920, 11 lorry-loads of British troops entered Granard, sacking the town and burning the Greville Arms to the ground, in retaliation for the shooting dead of a ...”