“... the story of Evans, half-submerged in a group biography of fellow survivors and alien torturers; a war story, half-lost in the subsequent peaceful and prosperous career of a national celebrity, a medical man and a ladies’ man; a brutal, cartoonish war novella, swallowed in prequel and long finish. The big losers are scale ...”

“... It​ was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army. He deserved a fanfare.’ This is how Aaron Copland explained his Fanfare for the Common Man, composed in 1942 for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. If any theme links the books discussed here, it is the victory of the ‘common man’ – as represented by English and Welsh archers – on the battlefield of Agincourt, over the chivalric aristocracy of France ...”

“... to ‘rack-renting’, defined as ‘to raise rent above a fair or normal amount’. In times of war or other emergencies, the ‘profiteer’ is soon identified, defined as ‘one who makes excessive profits esp. illegally or in black-market conditions’. The​ history of taxation is a rich field for studying such changing and inchoate, but ...”

“... the Creole childhood in Martinique, volunteering to fight for the Free French in the Second World War, his career in Lyon as arrogant young psychiatrist, the part he played in the war in Algeria, the encounters with Nkrumah and Lumumba, his death at the age of 36 – to realise that his is a voice coming to us from a ...”

“... to make this a better world’). Her politics is normally more than reasonable, but this recent war has played havoc with her judgment. She is not alone. As I get close to the town, military radio lists a host of northern locations and instructs their inhabitants to make for shelters and safe places, an announcement whose wisdom is confirmed by the heavy ...”

“... harrowing account of the mental disorders Fanon encountered as a psychiatrist during the Algerian War of Independence. The argumentative force of this closing chapter, and its position in the book, throw doubt on the first chapter. Violence was never Fanon’s remedy for the Third World; it was a rite of passage for colonised communities and individuals who ...”

“... of British writers (those, like Auden and Isherwood, too young to serve in the First World War) suffered from this. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, their main impetus for engaging with it, at the front or in print, was anti-Fascism. But there was also a sense of atonement: a belated opportunity to stand up and ...”

“... for, as Hutton points out, the net effect of all these changes was ‘the entrenchment of the old class structure that Tory radicals affected to despise’, with the gap between those able and those unable to afford private health, welfare and education far, far worse at the end than when it began. Hutton is also rightfully scathing about the extent to which ...”

“... that the best destabilisation technique the Americans have had over the last thirty years of Cold War has been Willis Conover, with his Voice of America programme beaming jazz two hours a night across the Iron Curtain. Not that Aksyonov presents his Moscow hippies as being in any sense politically vital. In one of the less ecstatic of his digressions, he ...”

“... within Europe, by contrast with England, or with Spain and Portugal growing up out of the war against the Moors within Iberia. One of the many Celtic mysteries, which Calder could not have found space to explore, is why Celtic society in old Ireland, but not in the Irish-Scottish Highlands, seems to have been rigidly divided between a ruling ...”

“... are still many places where one can live without papers and not too badly either, there are first-class plastic surgeons who will produce a better new face, and officials who will sell genuine identity cards and passports to fit it. But Escobar would not abandon his wife and children, whose lives were being threatened by a special Colombian police unit that ...”

“... He won his job and ended generations of Christian Democrat rule by appealing to younger middle-class voters – and their employers – who regard it as obvious that economic growth and carbon thrift go together. It wasn’t so obvious to the SPD boilermakers in Augsburg, with their eyes on traditional support in the old mining and steelmaking regions of ...”

“... This changed with the opening of the first purpose-built dance halls after the First World War, intended to cater to a lower-middle and working-class public whose wages were rising and who were eager to hear the new jazz music performed live. The new halls, constructed in every major town and city in the country ...”

“... is family background. For all its democratic politics, Athenian society was intensely class-conscious. Although Alcibiades was a product of that complex network of upper-crust intermarried families which produced most of the city’s leaders, and could trace his ancestors on his mother’s side back to the Trojan ...”

“... to be seen as a ‘problem’. Enoch Powell prophesied ‘rivers of blood’ and white working-class fascists shaved their heads. A series of Immigration Acts was passed, dividing families, stemming the flow. Most of the migrant workers had originally meant to stay a few years; go back with some money. But it didn’t often work out that way. Most of them ...”