“... tin helmet and gas-mask satchel. As it is, there are only television’s (almost weekly) World War Two documentaries and assorted World War Two romances to mitigate the withdrawal symptoms, as well as the steady output of Churchill books. Because so many are so ready to protest so much over anything not entirely ...”

“... Predicting what​ will start a war, and when, is an unrewarding business. Long-term trends (‘causes’) are often clear enough, but not the proximate causes, or triggers. We can assess the comparative significance of competition for resources, hunger for power, the nature of political systems, the psychology of leaders ...”

“... Ladies’ Paradise, La Bête humaine) to the art world (The Masterpiece, Nana) to the theatres of war (La Débâcle), and everything in between. At times, it feels as if nothing that exists is outside Zola’s intimate knowledge. He seems familiar with every screw and bolt in the machines that lower men into mines and the trains that carry passengers from Le ...”

“... above and the cringing mass below prevented the emergence of anything resembling a modern middle class. Karl Wittfogel, the leading ideologue of the German Communist Party in the early 1930s, was the leading proponent of this theory. He went to the United States, and taught at Columbia and the University of Washington. Oriental Despotism was published in ...”

“... Late Victorian world of optimism and faith in progress that had been shattered by the First World War. That trauma destroyed the old values: but not for Carr. As a young diplomat, he found himself posted to Russia, where the war had helped to trigger off a revolution. Carr evidently regarded it as the next step ...”

“... laudatory it was, too. This should give my readers a clue. The author is a partisan in the civil war which has been quietly raging within the Conservative Party since it elected Mrs Thatcher as its leader in what I have called the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ of 1975. Lord Carrington could be described as a ‘wet’: that is, he belongs to the traditional wing ...”

“... of a Garden of Remembrance honouring ‘Americans of Japanese ancestry’ who suffered in the war; the University’s president, Robert Coogan, declared that the memorial’s purpose was ‘to acknowledge the past, honour those our nation wronged, and rededicate ourselves to a future in which such things will never – never – be repeated’. What ...”

“... We have a layer from his early childhood, a layer from his year at prep school, during the 1914-18 war, another from his cheerful time at Bedales, as an Aldous-Huxley-and-Yellow-Book-inspired highbrow (with still the vaguest notions about the facts of life); a layer from his service with the Royal Army Medical Corps, venereal disease department, in the desert ...”

“... living in the province of Kosovo. Clark rode to their rescue, directing the first fully-fledged war waged by the Atlantic alliance, an aerial campaign to oust Serb security forces from Kosovo. That Nato eventually prevailed was hardly surprising. That it did so without suffering a single combat fatality was nothing less than astonishing. General Clark’s ...”

“... Paul, it should also be said, is someone Waugh thinks we need to be suspicious of: after the war, ‘even in Poland’ – it is not quite clear what the ‘even’ is doing here – ‘his concerts were cheered to the rafters as his hypnotic stage-presence continued to exert its effect over listeners, in spite of playing that was rough, nervy and ...”

“... novels, of which The Blaze of Noon, published a week or two after the start of the Second World War, remains the most memorable. It had a foreword by Elizabeth Bowen, rather surprisingly, and was certainly very similar in its atmosphere and method to the French novels which were to become the fashion after the ...”

“... The Sunset she knows is a neighbourhood of ‘fog and Irish bars and liquor stores’, working-class and culturally mixed-up. In the 1980s Romy has brushes with the sad leftovers of the counterculture, like a commune called the Scummerz which subsists on the manufacture of purple microdot, but Romy’s San Francisco is not a place freethinkers go to find ...”

“... the prints.’ At the same time as he was working on the Wanderings, Fontane wrote a series of war books that even he did not seem to find particularly compelling. He told his publisher that he wanted to write a book about the Austro-Prussian War, ‘first because it will enable me to bring the Schleswig Holstein book to ...”

“... of Our Lord’s Passion conducted as an aspect, almost a celebration, of the Serbo-Croatian war. Peace is not what they pray for. Instead, he writes, ‘the images presented were of sacrifice and blood and violence.’ A still greater contrast with the void Communism left in Ukraine is the amplitude of Catholic practice in Poland. Here, it never ...”

“... she sounds the sort who would pen what is (according to the Times) ‘a chronicle of working-class life in York over several decades’. Then began what the Scotsman referred to as ‘Scenes from a Maul’. The London media descended on Atkinson. A man from the Daily Express asked her to explain what Post-Modernism was; Richard Hoggart, chairman of the ...”