“... the 20th century, every significant Latin American politician who won office by mobilising class grievances was quick to move to the corporatist right. Getúlio Vargas, within five years of becoming Brazil’s president in 1930, eliminated the considerable left wing of his coalition, consolidating his power to create something approximating a fascist ...”

“... could be a tactical ally against American imperialism. They failed to see that he wanted to wage war at home: his furious inauguration speech with its talk of ‘American carnage’ was a declaration of war on urban racial liberalism, especially as represented by New York, the city that had rejected him.Trump’s outlook ...”

“... aspirant mother. Of course, those sensitive and ambitious women are usually the mothers of lower-class males; and in Wharton’s case, as in that of other 19th-century women writers, identifying with a father might have been more to the point. But while she speaks more fondly of her father than of her ‘beautifully dressed mother’, the most she can manage ...”

“... tradition; and the understanding that the economic power of the United States after the Great War made possible achievements that at least in part depended on its independence, belatedly proclaimed, of the European past. This last point, on which Douglas strongly insists, may provoke some opposition. For example, she says more than once that Hemingway ...”

“... Life as a prisoner of war is an indeterminate sentence, and for that reason nothing you say about it afterwards can ever be quite true. In its more mitigated forms, with Geneva conventions, Red Cross parcels, letters from home and all that, no doubt a sense of the normal order of things can be maintained. But in some forsaken gulag, outside all the rules, with all information filtered through the enemy, you enter a new dimension whose nature is hardly communicable in words ...”

“... was not much of a family man, but here the evidence is more equivocal. At the beginning of the war he sent his first wife back to South Africa with their two young children, but when he was demobbed in 1948 neglected to bring them back to England, or even to make sure they were looked after. On the other hand, relationships were rebuilt when his children ...”

“... During​ the Second World War and the decades that followed, historians of modern Germany focused on one question: how did Nazism, with its negation of freedom and democracy, its aggressive commitment to war and conquest, its creation of a totalitarian state, and its visceral and genocidal antisemitism, take hold in Germany but not elsewhere in Europe? They sought an answer by delving deep into German history, as far back as Martin Luther, or even to the tribes analysed in Tacitus’ ethnography Germania ...”

“... and French propagandist during the period of Prussian rule which followed the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, a time when most Alsatians were largely indifferent to Kulturpolitik. Ungerer’s work most resembles Hansi’s in his illustrations to Das grosse Liederbuch (1975), a collection of German folksongs and nursery rhymes. Hansi was a super-patriot ...”

“... composition of the protests in Donetsk. The pro-Maidan protests, when they took place, were middle class and nationalistic; anti-Maidan was lower class and anti-oligarchic (and Russian nationalist). ‘I would see the people at Maidan and think: “What nice people, so well dressed, so educated.” Then they would open their ...”

“... which was not in favour of land reform. Torn by endemic struggles between warlords, with civil war shading into brigandage, and social, racial and religious divisions, Mexico seemed easy meat for further United States aggression, unless someone else got there first. Ever since the country gained independence in the 1820s, Mexican conservatives had been ...”

“... on the edge of the Cotswolds, where they strolled arm in arm, like lovers trying to forget the war. They had much in common: both were cultured Germans, refugees from the Nazis. But their secret meetings weren’t romantic – she was a Soviet spy and he a scientist who knew ‘the most dangerous secret in the world’. His name was Klaus Fuchs. A US ...”

“... career by any measure. In 1864, after only two years in office, Bismarck led Prussia into a war with Denmark over the independence of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. The Prussians entered this war as allies of Austria, but Bismarck exploited the ambiguities of the postwar settlement in the conquered duchies to ...”

“... who was then a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, didn’t cover the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. He was too busy reporting on the civil war in Greece. But on repeated trips over the next decade to what reporters and cartographers still called the Levant, one thing Sparks always came back to was the plight of ...”

“... as a lost masterpiece. The film never settles in form, tone or mood, moving from sharp satire and class observation to doomed romanticism. It undercuts its own realism with dazzling cinematic moments (the soaring camera abandoning the duel as soon as it starts), just as it offsets the seriousness of its wartime propagandist purpose with levity and wit. Watch ...”

“... caesura: an epoch dominated by the October Revolution, classical social-democratic working-class movements, and a Keynesian-Beveridge political economy, has now irretrievably passed. They also share the tendency to encapsulate the transition from one epoch to another in pithy slogans: John Lloyd speaks of ‘End-of-History politics’, for ...”