“... may think, his popularity is not confined to the plebeian sections of the city: many middle-class students are searching for extreme solutions in the guise of religion, and not just in Lahore. This city, more than any other, is an accurate guide to what is going on in the rest of the country, because Pakistan, since the defection of Bangladesh, is ...”

“... an amateur historian and, unlike many survivors, spoke often and vividly of defeat in the Civil War, of having been arrested in France and handed over to the Gestapo, and of the 28 months he had endured in the Flossenbürg camp. He also had administrative experience and contacts in the Catalan parliament, which in 2001 gave him the Creu de Sant Jordi for ...”

“... Before long, he had a chance to leave his land and sharecrop with Piet Reyneke, an old Boer War veteran who was well aware what a good stock-farmer Kas was. Kas was happy; he had nothing against Afrikaners as such: Nieman was clearly a complete shit but Reyneke was a good ou (‘chap’). Kas was comfortable with Afrikaners and knew their ways. His ...”

“... to go. Forced off the throne by the Allies to secure access to Iranian oil during the Second World War, Reza Shah asked the British to let him go to Canada. Instead, they led him off to India, but in Bombay switched him to Mauritius. There he found the climate disagreeable and managed to be transferred to Johannesburg, where he died. He was subsequently ...”

“... life, especially her love life, he argues, reveals the tensions inherent in the urban middle-class experience during this period: between older and younger generations, between respectability and opportunity, between the public perception of events and reality.Frieda arrived in Berlin from the country in 1902, aged 27 and unmarried. As a child she had ...”

“... Nigeria was a young nation, created in 1914, as Nigerian children would learn in history class in the endlessly repeated sentence: ‘Lord Frederick Lugard amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates to form one country and his wife gave it the name Nigeria.’ It is debatable whether, at independence, Nigeria was a nation at all. The ...”

“... creation of utopia – otherwise defined as the end of history, or the full victory of the working class. If history does not know its script, it must be forced to act as if it did, dragged by the scruff of its neck towards an always glorious, but always receding climax. As W.H. Auden remarked in another context, those leaders who believe in the possibility of ...”

“... on, but in a different way – the clubs stopped being places where young and old of a similar class would join forces. Many of the sports dwindled, musicians disbanded, evening classes were often dropped by institutes for lack of interest. You can’t complain, really. Bach generation wants to burn down the churches of its parents. There’s nothing wrong ...”

“... by seeing himself as a lucky convergence of opposite forces and tendencies: ‘Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me… . The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation is to absorb all the traditions [and all the] classes; make them mine, me theirs.’ So the ...”

“... people, they were as isolated from the majority of the population as they were from the ruling class that had produced most of them. But there was a much broader web of sympathisers and donors, often inspired by sensationalist depictions of revolutionaries in the press. Without those sympathisers, there would have been no movement. It was the ...”

“... Woolf occur in the original script and the visit to the country house on the eve of the First War, but these are presented as the memories of Hugh and Moggie, the upper-class couple who sit out the Second World War in the basement of Claridge’s. The transitions in time and the ...”

“... in the Polish city of Lodz and ends with another. The 45 years between the end of the Second World War and the emergence of a free, non-communist Poland separate them. But the younger women have decided to start again at the point where their elders left off – and to avoid their mistakes. In 1945, the main railway station in Lodz, like most Polish ...”

“... himself into a quest for Nazi favour and patronage and allowed no realistic assessment of the war’s probable outcome to call it into question. Degrelle’s campaign for recognition as the Nazis’ most useful partner in Francophone Belgium went through several stages. At the beginning, he was very much an outsider. Reeder, who never had much use for the ...”

“... things, giving the impression of a camera left running long after the event proper has finished. War’s inglorious aftermath preoccupies several of the recent books, the years 1919 and 1946 in particular. In Desolate Heaven (1997), Peacetime (2002) and The Kingdom of Ashes (2007) are populated with men and women bewildered and resentful at having been ...”

“... On 30 July 1914, it suddenly dawned on Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany was on the threshold of a war with three great powers. Panicking, he grabbed a recently arrived dispatch from St Petersburg and committed his agonised thoughts to paper in a frenzy of marginal scribbles. England was the author of Germany’s predicament, he scrawled ...”