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“... of those are there in the world? He wrote his DPhil on how to protect children more effectively in war zones; he’d wanted to serve because he loved his country enough to risk dying for it: I walked into the rotunda at Rhodes House – a fancy mansion on the Oxford campus – and looked up at the names etched into the marble. Those were the names of scholars ...”

“... The Power Elite, The Organisation Man, The Feminine Mystique and The Making of the English Working Class – you’ll find they depict a world moving towards an almost claustrophobic cohesion. Classes consolidate, whites push down on blacks, blue collars are hemmed in by white collars, and grey flannel suits march down city streets lined with offices and ...”

“... Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri and the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon), 2006 (Israel’s war on Lebanon), 2008 (internal fighting in Lebanon) ‘prevented us from having the freedom to reform’. I asked them if security forces had shot at unarmed demonstrators. They all said no and insisted that the regime had prohibited the use of weapons against ...”

“... site for a good deal of what was nonetheless more accurately described as the Bosnian ‘village war’. ETA is notoriously active and supported in the industrial suburbs of Bilbao and San Sebastian, as well as in the Basque mountain heartland. Belfast has undeniably been the focus of much of the Ulster conflict, and there has been forced segregation of the ...”

“... one of Popper’s last appearances in public. He shared his recollections of the outbreak of World War One: it had ruined his school holidays. This was an inheritance light-years away from that of the millennium’s righteous-cause addicts. Whatever the verdict on his open society, no serious analysis could confuse it with the open market religion of the 1980s ...”

“... near his prey, missed and was mauled. Charles, having lost an arm and won an MC in the First World War, was felled by an angry buffalo in Tanganyika in 1928. Grey’s remaining brother, Alexander, a vicar in Trinidad, died aged 44, probably from the after-effects of a childhood cricket injury.Biographers of Grey, including the latest, Thomas Otte, have taken ...”

“... Again and again, I was reminded of Reconstruction in America, the traumatic aftermath of the Civil War. Here again was a sullen, defeated society. There had been no gunfire, but West Germany felt as victorious as the American North must have done in 1865. Here once more came the carpetbaggers, smart operators from Frankfurt or Düsseldorf pouring into East ...”

“... to them and received, on the whole, an excellent academic education. Although primarily middle-class institutions, a significant number of working-class children also attended them. For some this meant cultural liberation and social advance; for others merely social alienation. Even by this point, however, there was ...”

“... tradition. The first regards Labour as standing for and responsible to an industrial working class organised by its own institutions, particularly the trade unions. It endows that class, rather as Marxism does, with a unique, possibly predetermined, place in human development but sees it, nonetheless, as surrounded by ...”

“... resounding and sudden; in South Asia, Pakistan (marginalised and nearly abandoned by post-Cold War politics) has been veering between being a frail democracy and becoming a basket case. In no obvious way connected to all this, a handful of Anglophone writers has recently been emerging from that country. Most of them are young, and have written one or two ...”

“... about the matter of Britain. As Thomas Dilworth documented in his earlier David Jones in the Great War (2012), Jones saw more active service than any other British writer, all of it as a private, and outlived nearly all his contemporaries, with the exception of Robert Graves, born in the same year, 1895. The postwar life has its doldrums, and for a biographer ...”

“... surrounded and led to the end of the Habsburg dynasty. Well before the outbreak of the First World War the empire had been put under immense strain by many other contenders for power. On one side was a cluster of embryonic nations that were less and less willing to tolerate their subaltern status within the sprawling, broken-backed, multinational, imperial ...”

“... long after the medical fallacies on which they had been built were exploded. In times of world war the inland spas have proved a national asset: in 1939, for instance, the residue of hypochondriacs was tossed on to the street overnight and the hotels were stuffed with refugees from Whitehall. Where else could Fuel Controllers and Wool Controllers have been ...”

“... a betrayal of the country. Kim Philby, who actually did set out to betray a country as well as a class, was also strikingly disloyal to his friends (though they, almost irrespective of politics, seem to have been loyal to him). In order for Forster’s Choice to come up in your own life, you must be able to plead that there is something tremendously the ...”

“... of Just William, and racy novels featuring the tragic adventures of slim, persecuted, upper-class, ‘devilishly boyish’ heroines. Much of this was, of course, an endless rehashing of her own grudges and fantasies, but the prime motive was cash. Gyp (as she became in 1883) often repeated that it was hack work, dashed off at maximum speed and with ...”