“... has made possible a mutual East-West re-examination of the twists and turns in the record of Cold War conflict and confrontation. Last February, for example, there was a gathering in Moscow of top-level participants in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, from both the White House and the Kremlin: they were meeting to discuss how those events unfolded in each ...”

“... away, but the sound of artillery fire is audible only briefly. All the totems of First World War literature are absent, and yet the most interesting thing about the book is that it is even so a story about the war. The novel begins around 1914 and ends a few pages after the ringing of the armistice bells in 1918. There ...”

“... kings which in the Thirties became a Communist stronghold, the occasion was packed with Serb war veterans. The young workers who were there must by now have been recruited into the Federal Army, and sent to fight against Croatia. That the Krusevac ceremony was a requiem, not only for the Partisan dead, but also for Yugoslavia, was already clear. For at ...”

“... in Bosnia. It is a chronicle of Brkic’s Bosnian Croat family, from the end of the First World War to the present day (Brkic’s father emigrated to the US in 1959 and she was born there). The emphasis is on war: the Second World War, but especially the wars between Serbs and Croats in ...”

“... real. (For ages, I used to wonder why my toilet smelled like the Trench Experience at the Imperial War Museum when I cleaned it, which I did by pouring in limescale remover and bleach. Then I found out that I was, in effect, making poison gas whenever I did this. I asked the IWM how they got such an accurate scent of chlorine and they told me they use ...”

“... the chronicler of American poverty Michael Harrington once said, ended in 1948, when the Cold War began to call into question the idea that democracy would lead to socialism. But by that definition, perhaps the 1930s didn’t really end until 11 September 1973, when Pinochet launched his coup against Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected ...”

“... in service until her marriage, and the family belonged to what Gray calls ‘the affluent working class’. Between Aldbury, the picturesque but poor village where Landemare was born in 1882, the local market town of Tring and the backwater of Aston Clinton where she grew up, families like the Youngs were held in the orbit of the local landowners, who ...”

“... this book is not really about South-East Asia (although that is its setting) or about the Vietnam War (although that is its protagonist’s great obsession). It is not about travel (although its characters are travellers), nor about drugs and violence (although the story contains plenty of both). It is a book about images of all these things, especially ...”

“... commercial development. Those who had bought land in the city centre when it was cheap during the war now became very rich, and office blocks sprang up like mushrooms. Secretaries also did well. Between 1950 and 1962 an unskilled female office worker’s pay rose 180 per cent. By 1962, most girls leaving East End schools, and around one in five boys, went ...”

“... of vast state-funded social projects, but on the mid-20th century as a period in which middle-class modernist housing was built on a large scale in places like the inner suburbs of South London. It was housing you might not be able to afford yourself, but which you could take as a model when furnishing your own more mundane home.Every era creates its own ...”

“... Mies van der Rohe created his German pavilion in the city – and the end of the Spanish Civil War had a profound impact on Tàpies. As Catalan politics became more polarised, the revulsion against Spain grew more pronounced. My parents considered the world of bullfights, flamenco (they called it ‘maid’s singing’), and all the manifestations and all ...”

“... The years between the death of Queen Victoria and the beginning of the First World War seem now to have been leisure’s golden age. Recalling the summers of 1913-14, Osbert Sitwell noted that ‘one band in a house was no longer enough, there must be two, three even.’ House parties were distinguished by an abundance of exotic flowers, and mounds of peaches, figs, nectarines and strawberries ripening in ‘steamy tents of glass ...”

“... 1524, astrologers warned of calamity in southern Germany: floods and failed harvests, sickness and war. The clergy would ‘drink the cup of bitterness’. But peasant disquiet was sufficiently visible to make planetary auguries redundant. When the serfs of Stühlingen rose up at midsummer, the catalyst was mundane: the countess of Lupfen had made them collect ...”

“... book, Wallace relates how the good opinion of things German disappeared during the First World War. Wissenschaft and German civilisation were disparaged. Memories of hikes on German mountains, of sculling on the Weser and exciting days in the laboratories and seminars of distinguished German scholars, were repressed. Only 29 years after Acton wrote his ...”

“... as a bore – and a boor. It also evokes a deepening panic among America’s Anglophile ruling class. Wary of Jay Gatz, the self-made man with a fake Oxbridge pedigree, Buchanan is nervous about other upstarts rising out of nowhere to challenge the master race. Scott Fitzgerald based Goddard, at least partly, on Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, the author of the ...”