“... incredible that it simply has to be taken seriously,’ he noted in July 1939). On the eve of the war he wrote: Sat on a bench in Leicester Square gardens, realising that I have definitely ‘been called’ to be one of those who are to announce the true underlying event that is taking place during this century; aware of being perhaps the only human being ...”

“... more so than in the study of the English Civil Wars. John Morrill, that panjandrum of Civil War revisionism, is reported to have advised a recent meeting of the Royal Historical Society to think of 1640-60 not as the first of Europe’s modern revolutions but as the last of its wars of religion. J.T. Cliffe’s useful and unpretentious book on the ...”

“... passengers were half-stoned Western hippies on the overland trail through Asia. Then came civil war and in 1979 the Soviet invasion. Ambushes turned the highway into a death trap until the victorious Taliban swept into Kabul in September 1996, eliminating all security problems once again. The only threat when I travelled the highway a few weeks later was ...”

“... sign. Much as the Augustans wanted remoralisation and tranquillity after the upheavals of civil war and restoration, so today we seem to desire a universally accepted morale-bestowing conformity. The arts acquiesce in this more than they seem to know. Indeed, such internal conformity often strikes one as virtually a product of its apparent ...”

“... the difficulties. It was quite simply lack of state subsidies – and when, since the Second World War, this was remedied, thereafter opera has taken its rightful place in British musical life. By restricting himself to ‘opera in English’ rather than ‘opera in England’, Mr White offers little in the way of explanation. It was in the first place the ...”

“... bar of these bland recollections. Both Nora and Furet had been courageous critics of the Algerian War in their youth. But by the time they came to embalm the nation thirty years later, each eliminated virtually any reference to its external record from their retrospections. One would scarcely know France had a colonial empire at all in Furet’s history of ...”

“... mirrors.’ Her delusion appears to have been occasioned by guilt that she had survived the war and its nature underlines the degree to which she identified with the dead young men she wrote about in her autobiography Testament of Youth, which covers the years from her birth in 1893 until her marriage in 1925, but is centrally concerned with her ...”

“... a sophisticated device which, according to an American admiral, will ‘make America invincible in war and therefore be the greatest force for peace ever invented’. The secret agent in this otherwise forgettable movie was played by Ronald Reagan. He is still living inside the film, and he’s managed to lure a nation of 240 million people in with him. A ...”

“... by reference to sub-Freudian categories. One must touch the more ramified ganglia of American Cold War morality, and also of American nervousness about ‘the multicultural’. Hoover’s record and personality can be read as a sort of mirror obverse of what is tiresomely called the politically correct. He was not, for instance, just afraid and ashamed of ...”

“... wireless twice and sometimes three times a day. My father was a distant rumour. He was away in the war, and my mother believed that she might hear something of him if she listened closely enough to the News. ‘Hush! It’s time for the News’ punctuated our days as reliably as a chiming clock. First came the pips at one-second intervals, then: ‘This is the ...”

“... in some versions, Blondi the dog); that Unity Mitford gave birth to Hitler’s child early in the war; that 2014 was going to be, like 1914, a year in which world war broke out; and so on. I suppose I should have been prepared for the questions put to me by REN-TV, a privately owned channel which after its founding in 1997 ...”

“... new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician driven solely by ambition, the tyrant who ran roughshod over the Constitution, and the indecisive leader buffeted by ...”

“... which run through Marc Selverstone’s study of Western policy in the formative years of the Cold War. One is the notion of the ‘Communist monolith’, a giant command structure through which the Soviet Union controlled the thoughts and actions of every Communist in the world. But the other is the reluctance of so many policymakers, in Britain and the ...”

“... Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.’ Kelly’s comments echoed the president’s remarks in the rally’s immediate aftermath. (‘Some very fine people on both ...”

“... of 2019, the political scene in Berlin is in greater flux than at any time since the Second World War. The right-wing Alternative für Deutschland, founded in April 2013 in reaction to the Eurozone crisis, surged into the Bundestag in the 2017 election with 12.6 per cent of the vote. The Social Democratic Party scored only 20.5 per cent – a defeat of ...”