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“... preposterous tribute succinctly summarised the conventional wisdom regarding the end of the Cold War. The Good Guys had won, led by the genial but implacable Cold Warrior. His rhetorical assaults on the ‘evil empire’, coupled with a relentless military build-up, had pushed the Soviet Union into an unwinnable arms race, destabilised its economy and ...”

“... Empire and Parliament remained robust until well into the 20th century. With the Second World War, it became stronger than ever, not least because old prejudices about the Continental ‘Other’ were reconfirmed. Two hundred years after ‘Rule Britannia’ was first performed before the Prince of Wales, Britain once again, in the summer of 1940, proved ...”

“... the commander of the Hungarian army, or of Count Baillet von Latour, the Habsburg minister of war, in Vienna. They can also be very funny: Count Stadion, the gentlemanly Austrian viceroy in Prague, driving a revolutionary delegation crazy by fiddling with his pince-nez and burbling on about what a pleasure it was to meet such competent ...”

“... habit of secrecy and prevarication’. In 1911 a colonial wrangle brought Europe within sight of war: our world resounds with White House sabre-rattling, eagerly echoed by a clattering of knitting-needles from Downing Street. The book is put together on a plan adapted to its practical purpose. Its scrutiny of the second Moroccan crisis is firmly based on the ...”

“... One of the sombre gratifications of war, as we have had recent occasion to discover, is solidarity. War taps a longing to still the quarrels of ordinary life for the sake of something in common. This is a more pervasive longing than we like to admit. Even those who speak out against war are not immune to its lure ...”

“... 1871; the continued dominance of aristocratic elites over a socially and politically supine middle class; the entrenched power of the traditionally authoritarian and belligerent Prussian military tradition – in short, everything, they argued, that had come by the outbreak of the First World War to distinguish Germany from ...”

“... relish for the quirks, twists, stratagems, evasions, paradoxes and ambiguities of the middle-class mind, which is at once universal and his own. The description of that mind in the terms of psychoanalytic theory could have led to the forcing of a mechanical scheme on an infinitely various, recalcitrant reality. In practice, Gay is too sensitive and ...”

“... During the early years of Bolshevik rule (1917-21), when the regime was engaged in a civil war against its political enemies, there were many such jobs to be done. Stalin’s offices multiplied, largely thanks to the patronage of Lenin himself. Yet he remained strangely insecure and highly sensitive to criticism. One source of insecurity was his ...”

“... in any way comparable to that of the Communists. Instead, the searches for a ‘collaborating class’ which will be reliable, even the attempts to create such a class by digging the foundations for a new local bourgeoisie, go on today as they did in Vietnam. Influence is meanwhile exerted by prompting, elbowing, sticks ...”

“... three decades, the makers of American opinion have evaded the full significance of the Vietnam War – the mendacity, the brutality, the futility. The collective amnesia has been exacerbated by a counter-offensive from the right. Like German nationalists after World War One, American revanchists tell a story of a stab in ...”

“... were killed and 14 wounded: that started the revolution. In 1962, after a long and atrocious war, de Gaulle and the bewildered, exhausted French were forced to grant Algeria its independence. Millions of young Frenchmen were sent out to ‘defend’ French Algeria. A few thousand behaved disgracefully: torture was often used to extract information from ...”

“... There are grounds for thinking Tony Harrison the first genuine working-class poet England has produced this century. Of course, poets from D.H. Lawrence to Craig Raine can boast a proletarian background, but their poetry isn’t usually interested in doing so – not at its most characteristic and not to an extent that would make the term ‘working-class poet’ a useful one ...”

“... the textbook model of the battle of total annihilation against Rome at Cannae, but Rome won the war and Carthage lost it. On this subject the little dialogue in Brecht’s Galileo has said the last word: ‘Unhappy the country without heroes!’ – ‘No. Unhappy the country that needs them.’ How much difference did leadership make to the history of ...”

“... there is also a whole history of helplessness in the gesture: not only the boy’s but that of his class and time and culture and place. The gesture occurs at the end of Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants, 1987 – the year of the story is 1944 – but it has echoes and relatives everywhere in French films since the ...”