“... It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese ...”

“... in 1899 to South Africa, under the tutelage of George Wyndham, Under-Secretary of State for War. In the Boer War he distinguished himself in some of the hardest fighting, and eventually became ADC to Lord Roberts. Meanwhile, his grandfather had died and he inherited the dukedom. He came home to marry his childhood ...”

“... period of silence from you would be welcome’; Earl Attlee travelling to the Lords by third-class rail and Tube; Attlee allowing himself to be canvassed in 1966 by Labour students who didn’t recognise him, just nodding and saying, ‘Already a member’ – and so on. Given that he was fated to preside over six years (1945-51) of stringent ...”

“... to Europe, but to mankind in general, to find a way of bringing to an end the Hobbesian chaos of war between nations with its casual massacres of civilians and organised slaughter on the battlefield. Mazower’s glum conclusion, reached almost before his book has begun, is that ‘we have moved from an era that had faith in the idea of international ...”

“... had won so few seats in the elections. In 1996, they went underground and launched a ‘People’s War’, demanding sweeping reforms. Thousands of lives and much anguish later, only two of their demands turned out to be non-negotiable. One was the abolition of the 240-year-old monarchy, the other a new constitution drafted by an elected assembly. What made ...”

“... of the city’s population directly. Yet it threatened to bring about a barricaded super-class whose power would restore cliffs of social difference higher than those of Victorian London, at a time when the city’s relatively brief importance as a centre of big manufacture was ending, and when its democratic self-government had been abolished in a ...”

“... just before his entire company was killed. The injury to his leg, which took him out of the war, occurred a couple of weeks before Passchendaele, which none of his comrades survived. It is axiomatic that in such circumstances survivors do not feel lucky; they feel cursed. Her mother’s nursing saved her father’s life, or so he said; but this is not ...”

“... daubed in white paint leave no doubt as to the nationality of the perpetrators of this act of war on the retreating Iraqi convoy. ‘I love Chicago,’ proclaims a four-ton truck skewed in the sand at a crazy angle. Another hand has written ‘HIGHWAY CHILD’ on the door of a gutted saloon. At the bottom of the hill a British soldier clearly went to some ...”

“... which demanded that Germany be humiliated and punished: a demand partially satisfied by a ‘war-guilt’ article in the Treaty and its reparations clauses. In a chapter of The Aftermath significantly titled ‘Demos’, Churchill later recalled how difficult it was for him and the other ministers to avoid being pushed further than they knew they ought ...”

“... door. Crypts and tombstones across the graveyard were pockmarked with bullet holes from the civil war and the years that followed; specific gravestones seemed to have been targeted.A volunteer called David Ramírez López found a pistol bullet in the grave. He held it up for the others to see. The lead had been flattened by impact into a squat, pluglike shape ...”

“... Childe Harold makes for Greece via the Spanish peninsula, the most recent theatre of the long war against France which followed the French Revolution. As the Vietnam War demonstrated in modern times, nothing so divides and demoralises the Western intellectual as a war against a ...”

“... of malheur (‘misery’ or ‘affliction’), the exploitation of workers, of power, violence, war, duties and the need for roots – transfigures all this. Weil writes about her experiences with luminous clarity. Her austere and difficult life lends authority to her thinking in a way other intellectuals can only dream of.Yet that life depended to an ...”

“... The more Toby is admitted to the inner councils of government, the greater his abhorrence of the war about to happen. He rates it illegal, immoral and doomed. His discomfort is compounded by the knowledge that even the most supine of his schoolfriends are out on the street protesting their outrage. So are his parents who, in their Christian socialist ...”

“... to the detriment of necessary work in the Courts? The person tried and convicted at the war-damaged Old Bailey was a stout and ailing Scotswoman called Helen Duncan, whom few people loved and many exploited. She was not a witch in any popular sense of the word; she did not fly, wear a pointed hat or have congress with the devil, and neither she nor ...”

“... are now printed for the first time ever. The novel was written in China in the immediately pre-war years; the ballet belongs to 1942, when Empson was working for the BBC and writing propaganda for Chinese consumption. Between Cambridge and the BBC he had published Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Poems and Some Versions of Pastoral (both of 1935), and a ...”