“... style, let alone movement – existing between, say, the 1870s and the end of the Second World War, the trend would be a gradual ascent with some stunning vertical spurts before and after the First World War. In his new book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, the inordinately prolific and widely admired Peter Gay has much ...”

“... Across Europe​, military leaders are dreaming of war with Russia. Nato’s defence chief, Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, has called for a pre-emptive, ‘defensive’ strike (whatever that means); the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said in the autumn that it might have been ‘the last summer of peace for Europeans ...”

“... through and through, to the logic of monetary exchange – and the nature of capitalism and class struggle. Marx now had a folder to himself, as did Fourier and Saint-Simon. There were new dossiers on the Stock Exchange, the Working-Class Movement, Professional Revolutionaries, the Commune, the materialist ...”

“... that he conceived and named the policy of containment pursued by the United States during the Cold War. It was, he said, ‘designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world’. The policy was set out in a 5000-word telegram he sent from Moscow ...”

“... to make peace with them. Based on essays which appeared in the New Yorker this summer, The Longest War has the advantage of immediacy, of intimacy. The anguish it describes, an anguish located in the first-person plural employed almost throughout, has not been tempered by time. Written in the form of a journal, The Longest ...”

“... salacious books with titles such as In the Grip of the White Slaver, The Girl That Disappears and War on the White Slave Trade. The plot varied little: as J.P. Wilson wrote in The White Slave Traffic in 1912, ‘her slavery lasts some five or six years as a rule, and then she is flung out upon the streets, her character gone, her hope dead, her body ...”

“... weapons have been hard to come by. Instead, their very power has constrained their use. War has always been destructive for the losers. It’s sometimes destructive for the victors too: the Soviet Union lost 13 per cent of its population in the Second World War. But until the invention of nuclear weapons, victory ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Stalin’s anti-semitic campaign (‘rootless cosmopolitans’) after the end of the Second World War. At the very end of his life, Stalin turned his mind once again to the ever-irritating Jewish Question. He planned to unmask yet another great conspiracy engineered, of course, by ‘Joint’, the sinister Jewish organisation which masterminded foreign ...”

“... two decades Japan piled up annual growth rates of 10 per cent and more and produced world-class steel, electronics and cars, financed entirely by domestic savings, without a penny of foreign capital – thereby flatly contradicting the current IMF dogma that global financial markets are the key to rapid growth. Forced to rely on energy imports, Japan ...”

“... believe my eyes. At about the time that I was learning to be truthful in my high-school writing class, Betty Mahmoody, who, like my mother, is an American woman from Michigan married to an Iranian man, wrote her memoir, Not without My Daughter (1987). In 1984, one of the worst years of the Iran-Iraq war, Mahmoody left her ...”

“... Trickett argued that the Greens’ success reflects a squeeze on Labour’s vote from the middle class (93,000 voters registered a Green first preference in London before backing Khan). But the story is more complex: Green wins in Tynedale, Alnwick, Stockport and Derbyshire suggest they are vying for the third-party role in English politics more ...”

“... socialist society ... was essentially built’ in which ‘the alliance of the working class and the peasantry was placed on a solid socio-economic footing,’ ‘ethnic conflicts became a thing of the past’ and ‘Marxist-Leninist ideology became dominant in the minds of the Soviet people.’ ‘History,’ the document said, ‘has not known ...”