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“... His mind, like Billy Pilgrim’s in Slaughterhouse-Five, has been damaged beyond repair by war. Leon volunteered for the US Marines, fought in Vietnam, took part in a My Lai-type operation in which 59 villagers were killed, deserted to Sweden, became a ship-worker, was decapitated by a falling sheet of metal (lost his big brain, as the novel would put ...”

“... devoted in a slightly distant way to his lady, leader of a loyal band of ready and lower-class fighters who are often comic and even a little oafish’. Knight traces these changes through a vast number of texts, from the early ballads and gestes, as well as plays, games, references and songs, through romantic novels and plays, to end up in ...”

“... dialectic is ‘redcoatism’, after the practice of British regiments in the French and Indian War of lining up in bright scarlet uniforms only to get picked off by their assailants hiding behind trees. But the American Army itself became more regimented in this Old World sense as the Revolutionary ...”

“... Writing at the end of the Thirties, George Orwell remarked that the British ruling class had decayed so much that the time had come ‘when stuffed shirts like Eden and Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent’: It was an unfair comment, though not so unfair as his description of Baldwin as ‘a hole in the air’: yet it conveyed the view, subsequently shared by many, that with Eden the facade was more important than the interior, the appearance more impressive than the reality ...”

“... the way you found – almost without noticing – that you now also understood a good deal about class, caste, the colonial legacy, religious and racial discrimination, and the politics of local policing in Kerala. After Midnight’s Children had screamed out its ambition to explain the birth of modern India to a global audience, with its magical hero ...”

“... towns – enslaved, free, runaways, sailors and servants – but the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 and the huge expansion of Britain’s empire may have made them increasingly visible. The black presence raised questions about what it meant to have such an empire, one composed of peoples of different ethnicities and religious beliefs. A number of ...”

“... stops. But on 5 June, the day before we were supposed to pass through the Suez Canal, the Six-Day War broke out.The canal closed. The captain radioed for orders. We waited on the judgment of Leith. Benvalla spent two days at the southerly entrance to the canal, the same spot where hundreds of ships recently waited for Ever Given to come unstuck (come unstuck ...”

“... he saw himself ‘charging up some distant beachhead, like John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima’. ‘War movies with John Wayne’ sent Ron Kovic to Vietnam: ‘Yes, I gave my dead dick for John Wayne,’ he said when he returned a paraplegic. Vietnam vets and their doctors named ‘John Wayne Syndrome’ a stress disorder in which the soldier fails to live up ...”

“... but also independent of it. For his part, Dr Juvenal Urbino, though wooing a girl beneath his class, is not motivated by a great passion. This would seem to defy the arithmetic of Marxist prediction. ‘The truth was that Juvenal Urbino’s suit had never been undertaken in the name of love, and it was curious, to say the least, that a militant Catholic ...”

“... and primary momentum, lay. From the beginning, Osmanli rulers had drawn their legitimacy from holy war – gaza – on the frontiers of Christendom. The subjugated regions of Europe formed the richest, most populous and politically prized zones of the empire, and the theatre of the overwhelming majority of its military campaigns, as successive sultans set out ...”

“... else in the previous twenty years than that he would go away, mobilised him on the outbreak of war ‘to fight for Britain’, or, more precisely, to find the money which would enable Britain to fight. Much of the book, consequently, is given over to Anglo-American financial arrangements in which Keynes was a leading negotiator. Skidelsky’s stylistic and ...”

“... Leaves of Grass grew to include signature works such as ‘Drum-Taps’ (poems about the Civil War), ‘Children of Adam’ (Whitman’s sex-positive sequence ‘singing the phallus’, which got him in a lot of trouble and which Emerson had advised him to cut), ‘Calamus’ (hymns to male intimacy and comradeship which largely flew under the radar if not ...”

“... a laughing, embarrassed excitement. Relief, maybe, that the death had no obvious connection to the war. The lack of bloodstains, rubble, shrapnel or broken glass seemed quaint. And relief, perhaps, that it was someone else, putting a shiver of triumph in your own working limbs and heartbeat. The scene was an enactment of the world vis-à-vis Ukraine: we ...”

“... Examining the 1987 result, for example, he speaks of the rise in the Tory share of the working-class vote and the fall in its share of the middle-class vote as being the products of eight years of Thatcherism. In fact, this class de-alignment had been visible as a trend (and ...”

“... and Bobbety Cranborne all arrived at Eton in 1906, the first two from the affluent middle class and the other two from aristocratic families. Lyttelton went on to Cambridge and the others to Oxford, but they all served in the Grenadier Guards in 1914-18, and all four entered Churchill’s cabinet during the Second World ...”