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“... I still recall my acute disappointment with Michael Howard’s The Franco-Prussian War, published some thirty years ago. The subject was exciting – what with the desperate German infantry assaults at Gravelotte and the dramatic unveiling of the ultra-secret mitrailleuse – and the book was thick enough to promise much good fun to any schoolboy eager to read of battles with a threepenny bag of crisps at his side ...”

“... about their souls and their relationship to God – or, indeed, about exploitation and the class war – he was talking to them about their bodies and their relationships with their parents; and, above all, about their relationship to their own spoken words. In this medical context experiences that were mad and strange were called symptoms; the ...”

“... the dilemmas that torment Aron. They first press down on him at the tender age of 11½, in English class, in the Israel of the mid-Sixties, and become an obsession through the next three years that lead to his bar mitzvah, and then on to the Six-Day War of the nation state within whose syntactical history his life is ...”

“... because of the breakthrough work in computer science by Sir Alan Turing, a gay national icon, ‘war hero and presiding genius of the digital age’, who instead of committing suicide in the 1950s has become the world’s leading mathematical thinker, and a minor character here. Often the postulate of a counterfactual universe is a ...”

“... Zertal reviews some of the trials of Jewish collaborators who had immigrated to Israel after the war and were indicted under this law. These survivors were victims too, but the law required that their victimhood be suspended. Nevertheless, they were all given light sentences, as if the judges themselves had some reservations about the law. A far more ...”

“... hand to hand – sometimes against their neighbours. This was not, Theidon writes, ‘a sanitised war in which buttons were pushed and bombs delivered. The fighting was carried out with knives, rocks, slingshots, tirachas (homemade guns).’ Houses were burned and 65 per cent of the fields in Ayacucho were abandoned. The countryside was littered with pueblos ...”

“... they rarely referred to smoking as a public health problem that might have something to do with class and racial inequality, lack of education, or unemployment. Yielding to or breaking the smoking habit was all about will, choice and moral responsibility. Who needs a public health system when sickness is a personal failure?We are now in a world, Milov ...”

“... and the film was a big hit with US military personnel stationed overseas during the Second World War: ‘Gooood morning, Potsdam!’ Forgotten it may be, but Reveille has one of the all-time great soundtracks: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, proto rock’n’roller Ella Mae Morse doing ‘Cow Cow Boogie’, and, in his Hollywood debut, a slender young reed ...”

“... struggle to rise from the drudgery of manual labour or the daily grind of shop keeping into middle-class society. And on arrival the upwardly mobile have earned only a dubious privilege: Here you have the professional class and the bourgeoisie. The chief characteristics of the former are complacency, various forms of ...”

“... because once you judge anything to be ‘folk art’, the discussion can snarl up in class-based knots. Folk is ‘them’, those not talking proper, not doing the judging: most typically, in this case, the artisans of imperial, industrialising Britain, a century or so either side of 1840. ‘Folk art’ enthusiasts can’t avoid this awkward ...”

“... celebrations of himself and his illustrious career, from his time as an undergraduate at Columbia, class of 1950, with grades of A-plus from Lionel Trilling and Fred Dupee, continuing at Clare College, Cambridge, where he got a First in English and an invitation from F. R. Leavis, a figure he came to admire more even than he admired Trilling, to write for ...”