“... occupiers. Braithwaite wrote two devastating articles in the Financial Times opposing the Iraq War and the atmosphere of fear created by New Labour propaganda but Afgantsy is written in a very different register. The Soviet intervention is seen as a tragedy for both the Russians and the Afghans. The principal aim of Soviet foreign policy in the region had ...”

“... involving hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people and crossing all boundaries of class, caste and religion.The atmosphere among the protesters was largely peaceful and festive. The government provided the menace. Anurag Thakur, the finance minister, addressed huge rallies of RSS supporters with the chant ‘Desh ke ghaddaron ko, goli maro ...”

“... United States and on his return found England ‘miserably smoky and narrow’, because it was so class-bound.This zest for the modern helped to give Rosebery his huge public appeal. When he became prime minister, he not only had Granny’s chamberpot removed, he installed electric lighting in Downing Street (resisted by Gladstone) and insisted on typewriters ...”

“... Los Angeles by the American Film Institute to improve the minds of Hollywood hotshots. He was in a class with David Lynch and Paul Schrader.Something in him was set on making movies, though years later he would also adapt the Kenji Mizoguchi film Sansho the Bailiff (1954) for the stage. In addition, and almost to demonstrate his caring and not caring, he wrote ...”

“... directors, who raised money and established their names outside the continent. During the Cold War, it was rare to find a cinema in Africa showing anything other than kung-fu movies or cast-offs from Hollywood and the Soviet bloc. The outstanding success stories of the analogue era were Nollywood’s ‘direct-to-video’ releases, dating from the early ...”

“... less Jamesian: it is a thousand-word-long lament, in which a woman faces the prospect of a nuclear war, and confronts the inadequacy of any possible imagining of it. ‘I could weep for my furniture. The earth will be abashed; the furniture will stand out, balked and shameful in the ruin of everything that was our lives.’ Standing as it does immediately ...”

“... variety of different levels. During the late 18th and 19th centuries, when homely, suburban middle-class values were increasingly thought to be in the ascendant, it seemed altogether appropriate that the monarch should both reflect and embody them. At the same time, the Crown was losing its traditional, public, masculine functions of warrior-king and ...”

“... humans before getting back to Athens and Rome, to Florence, Bruges, Paris and New York. If the class is labelled ‘Art since 1945’, the teleological march will begin in medias res: aesthetic concerns and world-historical events predating the war will be lost in the primordial soup and only a few giant patriarchs will ...”

“... functioning majorities of power with a minority share of the vote, and a permanently empowered class of politicians and civil servants. When you make this point to anyone involved in active politics, they always, always say the same thing: ‘What about capital punishment?’ The idea being that if more power was given to the proles, the nation’s ...”

“... Winston Churchill​ was the dominant personality on the allied side in the Second World War: not the leader of the most important belligerent, nor even the most influential warlord in the Grand Alliance, but the most significant human being. His prodigious literary skills afterwards enabled him, thanks to the writing, publication and long-lasting celebrity of his war memoirs, immensely to distort the conflict’s historiography ...”

“... portraiture at least hinted at illustration. When in the 19th century commercial illustrators – war reporters, poster artists, advertisement makers, lithographic cartoonists, Punch illustrators – took to the field and began to represent modern life, a few artists tried running with them. Of those who wanted to get their teeth into it Henri de ...”

“... airfield in neighbouring Wisconsin, the wrong alarm went off – one indicating that a nuclear war had begun. The pilots of nuclear-armed interceptors had got their planes almost ready when the mistake was realised. The intruder turned out to be a bear. And then there are asteroids. It’s only a matter of time before Earth is hit, Clarke warns, so ‘a ...”

“... or not) by reference to recent liberation from foreign rule, the Germans can celebrate their post-war resurgence and re-union, the Americans can coalesce around a particular version of the War of Independence, and even around a nostalgic interpretation of their Civil War, but contemporary ...”

“... In American​ popular memory, the Second World War remains the ‘good war’, fought, to borrow the title of Tom Brokaw’s 1998 book, by the ‘greatest generation’. It is remembered as a time of national unity that not only destroyed tyrannies overseas but assimilated young men from all regions and ethnic backgrounds into a shared American identity ...”

“... is grateful but still keeps her distance from Dallas, and some viewers are disappointed to find no class reconciliation, no personal acknowledgment on Lucy’s part of Dallas as her equal. But Stagecoach does enact a break in hierarchy, an opening towards equality on the frontier. It is not resigned to inequality but knows that equality is difficult to ...”