“... paramount value of being John before going on to adopt the campaigning postures of the 1970s: anti-war, anti-consumerism, anti-Nixon, anti-clericalism, a brief bout of workerism, ‘power to the people’ and so on. It was rickety stuff, but for most of the time he meant it, and within a few years of his liaison with Yoko, he had graduated from the knowing boy ...”

“... siege ended, 18,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, most of them civilians, had been killed. The civil war between right-wing Christian militias and left-wing Muslim and Arab nationalist groups had already lasted seven years. Although Israel sent its Army into Lebanon only once before 1982, it had early been sought as an ally by the Christian militias, who ...”

“... Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970, three years after his humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War, the ‘naksah’ or setback that led to Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Sinai. Nasrallah was killed under a fusillade of eighty bombs dropped by the Israeli air force on his headquarters in ...”

“... beret, the Navy Seals were formally launched and special operators fanned out across the Cold War’s hot zones to raise counter-guerrilla paramilitaries behind enemy lines. Under Kennedy, Fort Bragg became a centre of training and education in special warfare for soldiers from both the US and client states; special forces operators were seconded to ...”

“... anthropology of the American Indian. Klara incorporates material for a historical essay about post-war Vienna. Facts give verisimilitude, but tend to diminish status. Detail can get the fraudulent a long way, as is proved by true stories of con men and their patter; and that may be one reason why novels of expertise, where subject-matter determines genres, are ...”

“... in the summer of 1940, practically all Arabs of the Levant were sure that the Axis would win the war. This would probably free their countries, Syria and Lebanon, from the French mandates under which they had lived resentfully since 1920. But then an Italian Armistice Commission turned up in Beirut (one of its members brought his grand piano). That their ...”

“... on what we want to know. It may tell us why German soldiers fought on tenaciously even when the war was self-evidently lost, or why economic life continued to function even under severe aerial bombardment. It may explain individual atrocities, such as the shooting of 335 Italians in the Ardeatine Caves in 1944. The commander of this massacre, SS Captain ...”

“... consequence of social and economic disaster. The poorer half of the population may end up, after a war or a plague, with a larger relative share of the national income and wealth, but only at the cost of surviving a catastrophe. It seems that the only satisfaction they stand to gain from such levelling events is the thin gruel of Schadenfreude. What Scheidel ...”

“... of her family might make for an ideal TV series, recounting as it does a comforting upper-class idyll complete with loyal attendants, marred only by revolution, exile and controversy and concluding with a triumphant return home to prosperity. An honest recounting of the story would have to feature among its climactic episodes the chequered career of ...”

“... from his convention speech and life story, Obama is best known for his early opposition to the war in Iraq. For this most cautious of politicians, his position on the war was a calculated risk, but a sound one. In the autumn of 2002, around the time Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards voted to give Bush the ...”

“... In pre-Civil War​ fugitive slave narratives – memoirs written by men and, occasionally, women who had escaped to freedom and hoped to convert readers to the cause of abolition – the most heart-rending passages described slave auctions and the separation of families that usually ensued. When the abolitionist journalist and underground railroad activist Sydney Howard Gay interviewed fugitives who passed through his office in New York City in the 1850s he found that the threat of sale was a major reason for the decision to run away ...”

“... I was there to make good something in his life. When he’d been my age, in East Germany, with the war just ending and the Russians in occupation, he had dropped out of school, and even spent a couple of months in proper prison, with real murderers. He was trying to ensure that nothing of the kind happened to me. A while later, I came upon the term ...”

“... L.L. Bean outdoor gear displayed in the fashion pages of GQ and Esquire. These days the Vietnam War has been reduced to a Generation X rock band named Diem. Recently, I overheard a young, pepper-bellied Mexican saloon-owner by the name of Dagoberto telling a Vietnam veteran in his overpriced Aspen bar: ‘You old farts, still mucking around in that ...”

“... in London (where their preponderance was supposedly due to the lack of eligible men post-war) Noël’s female acquaintance in Manhattan encompassed an inordinate number of lesbians – an entire social network of their own.’ And the men? The types to which he was attracted were ‘masculine, assertive, athletic and elegant’, preferably in ...”

“... ruled in his place and was known officially as Sir Max Aitken, unofficially, after his gallant war, as Biggles. He was widely liked, even loved; but though a civilised and kindly boss, he lacked the zest and edge of an ordinarily successful newspaper-owner, never mind the special, bottomless fund of vitality with which his father boiled. Best remembered ...”