“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... you’ve never heard of John Chilembwe,or of his mission church at MbombweHQ for his First War Risingfirst salvo for the Malawi nation.Yet as surely as my mother livedon the tracer-path planetleft behind in our world’s world lineso surely my memory discovers hernot in chemical coding but alive there stilland so surely John Chilembwe still gives ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and management in Parliament and a huge and dubious fortune as paymaster during the Seven Years War, and yet nursed and passed on to his son a grievance against George III for refusing him the additional reward of an earldom. Before he was well into his twenties, Fox, following in his father’s footsteps as a government supporter, had taken the Commons by ...”

“... T.P. Valera, who joins a gang of motorbike-riding Futurists as a young man in pre-First World War Rome. (Their stories are told in parallel.) Like Reno, he knows that a bike is about more than just speed. Recalling a girl he once liked being whisked off on an older boy’s motorbike, Valera remembers her ‘delicate feminine foot that had been carried ...”