“... better than the present lot – Sampras, Agassi, Moya, Kafelnikov, Rios and so on. The only first-class pre-World War Two player I ever saw was Henri Cochet, who had occasionally beaten the great Tilden in the Twenties. A skinny, muscular Frenchman in very short shorts, Cochet played in the first Cairo tournament I attended ...”

“... than a tragic, distressing or realistic act of violence emerged in the wake of the First World War, and became increasingly self-referential during and immediately after the Second. But it’s not the puzzle-solving that makes me read detective novels, though it provides much of the narrative momentum. It’s something else, something related to ...”

“... Union troops left the vanquished but still defiant South, scarcely a decade after the end of the war. Eric Foner has described the Reconstruction era, when ex-slaves became citizens and the first biracial Southern governments were elected to power, as America’s ‘unfinished revolution’. The battle over Reconstruction never ended; it has simply changed ...”

“... Station, on the rise of socialism, and Patriotic Gore, on the literature of the American Civil War. Leavis’s greatest enterprises were the journal he founded and edited. Scrutiny, and books which were often collections of articles, such as New Bearings in English Poetry, Revaluation and The Great Tradition. Trilling is most important for his ...”

“... an uneasy coalition of organised workers, socialists, social democrats and the progressive middle class. What the party says it believes matters to its members because these beliefs will profoundly shape its actions if and when it forms a government.It is worth emphasising early on that Corbynism brought intellectual and political life – as well as a mass ...”

“... realistic, and tell us the principal subject, the relationship between flamboyant upper-middle-class Julia and Fay, whose father was a cinema manager. The opening chapter’s ten pages enlarge on this, sketch Julia’s youthful success as a diseuse and tell us of her solicitor husband Charles’s death, mention Fay’s own glimpse of fame during the ...”

“... officers in charge of him. He was nicknamed ‘the tradesman’ – a reference to his working-class upbringing. His brigadier, he discloses, ‘unfailingly referred to the Irish, even the RUC, as Bogwogs’. The Brigadier kept a model in his office of a leprechaun sitting on a rock ‘with a small plaque bearing the inscription: “First Bogwog stone ...”

“... fallibility. And who has won? For the moment, the market economy and the primacy of the tribe over class. Nothing is final in human history and the market economy will no doubt generate its own discontents in time. In any case, market economies come in many shapes and sizes. Twenty-eight years of conservative-led governments in West Germany have not resulted ...”

“... a modern poet and would hardly expect a linked and lacquered historical account of the between-war years, with one thing giving rise inevitably, tragically, to another, although there is some of that in the pages on Versailles, which inescapably had more than economic consequences. Certain aspects have attracted the poet’s attention; he confers ...”

“... and Daniel were once secret speculators and gamblers on the Stock Exchange; Rudd had been a high-class (and sometimes not so high-class) courtesan; she had also supposedly taken on various other identities to ensnare unsuspecting men. In the court of public opinion there was no counsel to rule out evidence on grounds of ...”

“... to provide a home for herself and the child of that previous union. On the surface, all is middle-class respectability in Camden Town. But as news coverage of the Primaries increases, people begin to notice the resemblance between Isabel’s son and his real father: Isabel herself is seen by the candidate’s campaign managers as a potential menace, and ...”

“... from the Ottoman Empire. The icon shows the Annunciation and was immediately linked to the War of Independence, officially declared to have started on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation; the icon was thus taken to symbolise the rebirth of the nation. In 1940, a Greek battleship was sunk off Tinos by an Italian submarine on the day of the ...”

“... battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola. Celebrated as a war correspondent, he started off wanting to fight, and picked up his pen only when he couldn’t persuade his Radical friends to join him in setting up a legion of volunteers to help Greece in its war against Turkey. No man in ...”

“... propounded in The Leopard angered the Communist and fellow-travelling intelligentsia of post-war Italy. Yet Lampedusa’s scepticism was the product, not of reactionary ideals or aristocratic nostalgia, but of a strong sense of his island’s history. He did not deny Progress its place in England and France, but he was sceptical about its application to ...”

“... says, and a little later she’s pulling coins out of her purse for yet another donation. ‘A class gulf existed between our lives and those of the cleaners,’ Rowbotham wrote in 2008. ‘We were nearly all young, bouncy, in our twenties … The reality of the women’s lives was remote from us.’ At the time, Alexander wrote that ‘the dreary round of ...”