“... a liaison officer attached to the French naval forces in Scotland. It’s the time of the Phoney War, but phoniness isn’t much admired in Greenock, then or now, and Shoosky soon becomes something of an awkward man of feeling amid the hard drinkers and morose skippers of the town. He is ‘homeless, stateless’ – the transplanted son of ‘small aristos ...”

“... even Dr Searle’s researches reveal very little. What is striking about Lloyd George’s Boer War charges against Joseph Chamberlain is how much Ll.G could make out of the exiguous materials at his command. A family as deeply embedded in Birmingham industry as the Chamberlains were bound to be involved in ...”

“... eating and tirelessly talking his way through more than fifty years of politics, statecraft and war. Yet these two supreme egotists became as close friends as their personalities permitted, and it may be argued that anyone who is thankful that Britain ended the Second World War on the winning side should count ‘the ...”

“... presumptive POW status all indicate a casual disregard for international opinion and the laws of war. Most disturbing, however, are some of the threats uttered by President Bush. The assertion that ‘you’re either with us or against us’ obviates a central aspect of state sovereignty – the right not to be involved – and recasts the US as the ultimate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”