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“... a world very similar to that inhabited by his Virginian ancestors in the days before the Civil War. Baker’s mother and grandmother worked without benefit of electricity, gas or plumbing. While their menfolk laboured in the fields, they killed chickens, canned vegetables, scrubbed floors, baked bread, chopped wood and hauled water. After days of such ...”

“... after September 1939 when Sartre was called up and after June 1940 when he was a prisoner of war. They reveal what is often forgotten – that Sartre had an excellent sense of humour. There is nonetheless something disagreeable, and eventually tedious, about his insistence on telling Beauvoir about his affairs with other women. In the spring of 1948 when ...”

“... in Mao’s long career that he was evidently proud of, alongside victory in the 1946-49 Civil War; he said as much when he was interviewed by the American journalist Edgar Snow in the 1970s. It was also the most dramatic expression of his antagonism towards intellectuals, a consistent trait in his otherwise capricious career. From 1951, campaigns of ...”

“... brands were planning to raise their prices, millennials started to queue outside the shops. Middle-class Chinese usually go abroad on holiday and to do their luxury shopping, but this year, thanks to Covid-19, the estimated $300 billion spent on overseas consumption is staying at home. This is good news for the government: boosting domestic demand is central ...”

“... married women gained legal personality only in 1938 and it took the trauma of the Second World War to usher in women’s suffrage in 1944.Historians have puzzled over the reticence of democratic France – one of the earliest adopters of universal male suffrage in 1848 – to grant equal rights to women. In Only Paradoxes to Offer (1996), Joan Wallach ...”

“... easily. Andrew Sinclair helps to cut the moles down to size. The real intellectual élite in inter-war Cambridge, he reminds us, were not the moles or their contemporaries (mostly from the arts faculties) in the Apostles but the brilliant scientists at the Cavendish Laboratory. Even the Kremlin, Sinclair argues, learned more from Cambridge physicists than from ...”

“... Stein and Mabel Dodge, and had affairs with Marinetti and Papini. She spent the First World War in New York as part of Walter Arensberg’s circle, which included Duchamp, Picabia, Varèse, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. She sketched Freud in Vienna and lived among the avant garde in postwar Berlin. In the Twenties, when American expatriates ...”

“... in normal economic activity, they proved altogether too successful in the competition for middle-class and lower-middle-class occupations. Ancient superstitions survived all over Europe, too, so that it was not until the abolition of the Papal States after the reunification of Italy that Italian Jews were free from the ...”

“... to a head in the spring of 1917. First the United States vaulted onto the world stage by declaring war on Germany. Then, in the autumn, the successful Bolshevik coup inaugurated a challenger regime that would remain in contention for more than seventy years. With America’s entry into the war effectively guaranteeing the ...”

“... that he is the most consistently brilliant of all the film-makers who have emerged from post-war Poland. Andrzej Wajda is a greater genius, but even he does not have Polanski’s unerring talent for visual showmanship. Polanski is a child of the streets, who learned before his voice broke that it was a choice between hustling and dying. He was born in a ...”

“... or political opponents; above all always remember that, as the saying goes, ‘business is war’. During the course of the novel Crichton delivers a few critical swipes at America, whose terminal decline is best illustrated, as one typically well-informed character explains, by the fact that it now has 4 per cent of the world population, but 50 per ...”

“... attention. So he strove to analogise, to turn what he called the ‘deadly ecological war against the Ogoni’ into a struggle emblematic of our times. His writing thus lays the ground for a broader estimation of the human cost of the romance between unanswerable corporations and unspeakable regimes. Saro-Wiwa’s political realism was tempered by ...”

“... used retroactive decrees to execute criminals already serving time – all under the guise of a ‘war against indiscipline’. Soldiers flogged men and women for failing to use passenger bridges over highways or failing to form orderly queues at bus stops. Nonetheless, he enjoyed a reputation for probity. He considered his regime a necessary ...”

“... of France, Finland, Czechoslovakia and (until 1933) Germany. Anti-Fascism and the Second World War gave most European Communist Parties a second chance (Germany is an obvious exception), bringing them to the peak of their influence and indeed, from 1945 to 1947, of their participation in government. In France and Italy they even replaced the socialists as ...”

“... How does a novelist write about World War Two or the war in Vietnam? About populations deliberately enslaved or exterminated, destruction seen as normal? American writers differ from British novelists in approaching such all-embracing violence as too grotesque to be viewed in any terms except those of fantasy ...”