“... restaurants, where buskers play mariachi music or corridos for an audience that’s half middle-class, half drug dealers. It’s only recently that people have started going out at night again, and a number of establishments are still closed because of the cuota, the street ‘tax’ paid to the narcos for protection. Two years ago they asked for too ...”

“... hundreds of years, but with little to impress tourists despite being the site of a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery. At the end of a path lined with cypress trees a rectangle of clipped lawn is enclosed by low grey stone walls. Some 356 British soldiers and airmen of the First World War are buried here, the ...”

“... occupied with delivering twice-weekly lectures on Europe from 1870 to 1919 and a weekly graduate class on imperial Germany, I considered myself fortunate that I didn’t have to teach this course as well: I’d have struggled to keep up since I’d never studied anything remotely resembling it myself.‘Contemporary Civilisation’ was Columbia’s version ...”

“... and other cities damaged by the strategic bombing offensive in 1943. Ever since the First World War, the widespread belief that cities would be annihilated by aerial bombardment in the next major European conflict had inspired architects and planners to think of ways to build cities that would make them less vulnerable to attack from above. ‘The ...”

“... the Africans transported to the New World), came to the original 13 colonies. The Revolutionary War, followed by the upheavals attendant on the French Revolution, largely suppressed European immigration for a generation or more, and the United States Congress prohibited the further importation of African slaves after 1808. Then following the Congress of ...”

“... finished describing the upheaval and transformation created everywhere in the world by the recent war: But as the deluge subsides and the waters fall we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that have been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world. That ...”

“... before the appearance of the first nickelodeons, and pursues it through to the US entry into World War Two. Hollywood and Anti-Semitism is less a study of Jewish influence on American movies than an account of what Carr calls the Hollywood Question – which is to say, the ways that this presumed influence has been represented, and what those representations ...”

“... an unstable concoction. Trump is an enthusiastic trade warrior who occasionally indulges in anti-war rhetoric. His anti-empire talk may be as insincere as the ‘foreign policy for the middle class’ of Biden’s patrician national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Both nod to sentiments they can’t comprehend. After ...”

“... throughout the Arab East’. While the Israeli Communist Party commemorated the 1948 Arab-Israeli War as a struggle for national independence, Matzpen, which broke from the CPI in 1962, viewed it as a campaign of ethnic cleansing (or tihour, the term used by Zionist forces at the time). In fact it was both – but only Matzpen had the courage to speak of ...”

“... As seen​ by the English-speaking world, the Spanish Civil War was a screen on which certain images could be projected, images of harsh sunlight, moral clarity and sacrifice. It was an emblematic, almost allegorical war and a test case for conscience, a political crisis so thoroughly appropriated that the Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse hardly needed to point out that its contributors were overwhelmingly outsiders: it was the war that was Spanish, not the poetic response ...”

“... the mysticism and irrationality, the violence of politics, the idealism and barbarism of the Civil War. ‘Spain is different,’ said the Francoists in justification of their denial of human rights and democratic principles: it was not suited to representative government. Everyone else disagreed, rightly, while at the same time hoping that the country would ...”

“... is our house,’ they would say. They tried enrolling her in school when she was three, in a class with children twice her age, but she cried too much. Her parents ‘thought that I was a genius; they even arranged for me to take an IQ test to prove it’. It didn’t, so ‘they were convinced something was wrong with the test.’ She insisted on ...”

“... Having seen off the Macmillan Government in the 1960s, exposed the squalid underbelly of upper-class public life and fired the starting pistol to begin the sexual revolution by revealing that ‘You’ve never had it so good’ was actually ‘You’ve never had it so often,’ she reckons she knows what’s what about the world of politics and power ...”

“... the Cubans fought alone against the Spanish. Then, in April 1898, the United States entered the war against a now exhausted Spain, waving the flag of Cuba Libre. American journalists and politicians hailed the intervention: it was ‘the most honourable single war in all history’, in the words of George Hoar, Republican ...”

“... the door and looked in apologetically. We must have been conscripted at the same point in the war, but being older he had already been up at Oxford: now he was a graduate, starting a BLitt. Since he was already quite famous in university circles I knew who he was although we had never met. I remember being impressed by his clothes. In those days after the ...”