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“... Is it just a coincidence that one of this spring’s most popular films was called Civil War?My dictionary defines ‘myth’ as both a popular tradition that embodies core social values and an ‘unfounded or false’ idea. The word hints at intentional distortion of the truth. But truth is more or less beside the point in Slotkin’s discussion of ...”

“... explains in his perceptive new book, each constructed a myth about France’s behaviour during the war that served its own political interests; each claimed it had led the Resistance. According to the Gaullist narrative, France went to war in 1939 weakened by internal political struggles. It was quickly crushed in 1940 by ...”

“... had experienced herself, she didn’t like to travel, and her friends were few and from her own class. Her situation, she comforted herself, was like Jane Austen’s. She was contented: ‘I have had a rather uneventful life, thank God.’ Her greatest grief (‘almost’), Beauman writes, was when, near the end of her life, the New Yorker stopped accepting ...”

“... the Sikh wars, with one side supporting the Sikhs and the other the British. With the first Indian war of independence in 1857 (known in English history books as the Mutiny) there was the same division. I used to think, cynically, that the top echelons of the family did this deliberately: support both sides so that whichever faction of the ruling ...”

“... homosexuality and his poetry – he wrote some bad poetry – but in his view that there was a new class of ‘working artisans’ rising, and that ‘there is undoubtedly an entirely new (social) state of affairs coming about through their rise, and I hail it with delight.’ His increasingly open homosexuality came hand in glove with socialism. He liked the ...”

“... to Germany a much better businessman, and a polished renegade. The Condition of the Working Class in England followed in 1845. He moved to Paris, moved in with Marx, and when he wasn’t pursuing women, began to chase the dragon’s tail of revolution in the French capital, in Brussels and back in southern Germany. Engels returned to the Rhineland and ...”

“... was, whether it really existed and what the ridicule meant, as it was about the British working class and how it had been progressively disempowered and de-emancipated, first by the Conservatives, and then more decisively by New Labour. The Establishment, too, starts from a stereotype (the phrase was first used in its common modern sense by Henry Fairlie in ...”

“... wrote to him: ‘In a few centuries the common man will know our time as the period of the World War, but the educated man will connect the first quarter of the century with your name.’ This salute from one German-Jewish Nobel laureate to another was written six months before the Wall Street Crash helped to make National Socialism a mass movement, and it ...”

“... the realm of popular culture. From youth onwards he was a best-selling writer in the categories of war, travel and adventure. The Second World War turned him into a movie star, prompting him to remark in 1942 that he had already sold the film rights of his war memoirs. Later, Jack le ...”

“... poured tea from a big brass kettle while I asked him about the effects of more than two decades of war on the community. The collapse of the postal service was one of the more trivial consequences that he mentioned, but there was something moving about a village that hadn’t received a letter for 21 years. One of the hateful results of the long ...”

“... cause), Keynesian economics before it was fashionable, German civilians at the war’s end – you really can’t fault her. She was so wonderfully clear-sighted that it’s not even surprising to find her warning of the possibility of a Nazi-Soviet pact two years before the event. Since all the positions she took, no matter how ...”

“... committed to the campaign against militarism. Although Ettinger devotes one chapter to this ‘War on War’, she understates its significance. The ‘War on War’ was not merely a feature of the crisis years 1913-14, but dates back to 1898, when ...”

“... Strong to Save’. Archibald Wavell, one of the significant British military commanders of World War Two, as well as the penultimate viceroy of British India, was presented as a role model for the boys in those last days of empire, one of the few military figures looked favourably on by the intellectual middle class. What ...”

“... letters are very short, and merely contain changes of address or news of friends. They discuss the war, and the problems caused by the presence of the Germans, yet it’s striking how little the correspondence varies over the war years. They give their opinion of Sartre, with Paulhan being tactfully enthusiastic and Arland ...”

“... It’s generally assumed that with the Iraq War officially over and troops withdrawing from Afghanistan, US defence spending will drop. Obama’s reference in his State of the Union address to ‘saving half a trillion dollars’ from the defence budget encouraged this assumption, as have Republican complaints that such cuts would ‘decimate’ the nation’s defences ...”