“... he could expect to be upgraded, or at least to have ‘flight attendants smuggle me first-class meals in coach’. In restaurants, ‘waiters refuse to give me a cheque. Even toll collectors on highways, who will never see me again, refuse to take my money.’ They often tell him what he already knows: ‘Robert F. Kennedy was the greatest president ...”

“... he slipped into madness: he became obsessed with the devil’s march through the city’s working class and conducted exorcisms. Carles Puigdemont, the regional prime minister (president in Catalan), is the 130th man to run the Generalitat, the body which from the 14th century ran Catalonia under the watchful eye of Spain’s Aragonese or Castilian ...”

“... thousand on the night of 5 September. It was the greatest single French loss of the Second World War.The transatlantic liners that once made Le Havre almost chic have gone, but the sea is still just about the only way to get there from London. On a moonlit winter evening, as the shore approaches, the town lays itself out beneath an electric halo, the Church ...”

“... doctors, throws light on how clever women suffering from the miseries and frustrations of middle-class Victorian life used invalidism, often consciously, but even more interestingly, unconsciously, to protect their vulnerabilities and nurse their talents; ‘The Psychopathology of the Sofa’ is the subtitle. A Butterfly Under a Stone by Elizabeth Barrett ...”

“... Britain has fought the Americans twice. The first occasion we know about: it was the war that secured the colonists’ independence (1775-83). Mark Urban’s book is about the experiences of one British regiment – the Royal Welch Fusiliers – in that campaign. (Most of them weren’t Welsh, incidentally.) The second war scarcely anyone in Britain has heard of, and even Americans seem to be hazy about it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... other stories. One thing I did know was that the Nazis had been responsible for the Second World War, and that they were a very bad lot. What could have led William to become a Nazi, however briefly?‘William and the Nasties’ is a clumsy attempt to satirise the rise of Nazism. Greedy self-interest is what motivates the Outlaws, together with the belief ...”