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“... The school was a direct response to the Commune, to France’s humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War, and to a sense that its ruling class was bereft of talent, industry and imagination, its imperial and cultural mission a shambles. The university now known as Sciences Po was established as a new ‘crossroads of the ...”

“... against the background of the betrayals, suspicions and hatreds of more than a generation of civil war. It is not, of course, the only mass party of the Left in trouble. The German Social Democrats – only a few years ago, one of the most competent and cohesive governing parties in the Western world – are also going through lean times. So are the American ...”

“... at night. In the ranks of supporters were hardened veterans of the battle against the Vietnam War, especially of the famous blockades of the military recruiting centres in the Bay Area. Sympathisers of the not yet discredited Black Panther Party were in evidence, as were those who had been beaten and tear-gassed alongside César Chávez in his fight to ...”

“... might do without having to face one. Baldwin, facing one in the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, saw his task as being ‘to try and educate a new democracy in a new world and to try and make them realise their responsibilities in their possession of power, and to keep the eternal verities before them’. Their primary ...”

“... The Robin Hood aspect is to the fore. The Toveys see themselves as the rural frontline in the class war, and their book is full of contempt for rural toffs, or ‘ya-yas’, also called ‘saddle-bumpers’ by Bob because of the way they ride. Poaching started, Bob explains, when some people began to believe they owned all the land and others had no ...”

“... they are acts of ‘making’. When we do these things to each other, in torturing or in waging war, however, they are ‘deconstructive’. If it were not for the 32 pages on torture which it contains, this book might not be worth reviewing, but although Scarry’s intentions are palpably decent, her account is so wholly devoid of historical evidence and ...”

“... The Great War of 1914-1918 is at last a respectable field of study for British professional historians. There has been no lack of monographs on specialised aspects of that gigantic tragedy: what have been lacking are serious synoptic studies. The highly emotional arguments over the tactics and strategy of the Western Front, initiated during the war itself by the conflicts of ‘Easterners’ versus ‘Westerners’, and continued thereafter in the battles of the memoirs, were renewed after the Second World War by the defenders and detractors of Douglas Haig: arguments which for fifty years produced a great deal more heat than light ...”

“... Black/White and (as I’ve known to my cost) man v. wife, Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right, class v. class as bitter as before, the unending violence of US and THEM, personified in 1984 by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM, Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind, East/West, male/female, and the ground these Fixtures are ...”

“... of the ‘Cockburn Machine’, geared up to sabotage every institution in Britain in the event of war. Reading The Broken Boy, I realise that there is indeed a sort of ‘Cockburn Machine’, still operated in different parts of the world by the three brothers. This is the belief in the primacy of journalism by leak, the insistence that journalism is not so ...”

“... some statistician of the absurd will tell us that the tonnage of books about the Second World War has finally exceeded the weight of ammunition expended in its course. On the face of it, the scope and variety of this literature is enormous. It ranges across much of the globe, from Normandy to New Guinea, from Tunis to Moscow. It recounts the exploits of ...”

“... If Galtieri’s junta had prepared for war in 1982, even to the minimal extent of equipping Argentinian fighter-bombers properly, Mrs Thatcher’s Enterprise of the Falklands would almost certainly have failed, thereby ensuring that Argentina would still today be ruled by a triumphalist military élite, inept mismanagers of a decaying economy, impotent spectators of the country’s social disintegration, and of course both cruel and corrupt ...”

“... stories Mrs Henderson, is a gentle, helpful, observant boy growing up during the Second World War, a boy who is eventually bewildered by what human beings do to each other. He seems reluctant to define himself and Wyndham never gives him a name. At the beginning of his story ‘Obsessions’ he quotes Valéry’s Monsieur Teste: C’est ce que j’ai ...”

“... To the left of the entrance to The Spanish Civil War: Dreams + Nightmares (the exhibition runs until 28 April) is the Sargent Room. At the moment it contains three big World War One pictures: Sargent’s own Gassed, Stanley Spencer’s picture of wounded men on stretchers in Mesopotamia and Nevinson’s of troops crossing a desolate, shell-pocked battlefield ...”