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“... Mexico, Romania and the Russian empire. This remained the case until well after the Second World War, with the US still providing half of the world’s oil in 1955. But the centre of production has moved ever southwards, to the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and South America. Today, the US accounts for only 9.6 per cent of output; the Middle East for ...”

“... enemy. So he became involved in the great debate about Appeasement. Just 40 when the First World War came to an end, Londonderry shared the usual opinion that such a war must never be allowed to happen again. He was unusual in revealing from early on a disposition to be more understanding of Germany’s concerns than of ...”

“... monumental legislation and jump into aeroplanes to make visits to foreign powers. The Second World War immensely accelerated the pace of this change, and the reputation of Baldwin suffered, not merely because he was tarred with appeasement and unemployment, but because he represented a style and philosophy of government that was largely incomprehensible to the ...”

“... secret agent in plain view, Fénéon led multiple lives in the 1880s and 1890s. He worked at the War Ministry (of all places), and quickly rose to be its head clerk. At the same time he was also active as an art critic, explicating Neo-Impressionism when it emerged in 1886 (he coined the term); and after Seurat died young in 1891, Fénéon surveyed his ...”

“... the military coup in Niger on 26 July, the president of Nigeria, Bolá Ahmed Tinubú, threatened war if his ‘brother’ wasn’t restored to power. Mohamed Bazoum wasn’t restored and Tinubú didn’t invade, though he did cut off his country’s electricity supply to Niger. He also closed the thousand-mile border between the two countries to commercial ...”

“... Mere Christianity (a reworked selection of short talks he gave on the BBC during the Second World War) ‘is regularly cited as the most influential religious book of the 20th century’. Quite why the recycled wartime spiritual pep talks of a lapsed Belfast Anglican turned myth-cultivating Oxford don should, more than fifty years later, be a bestseller among ...”

“... and oh-so-modest failure; bestselling and most-translated German-language author before World War Two, and now again book of the week here, rediscovery of the century there, and indulgently reviewed more or less everywhere; this uniquely dreary and clothy sprog of the electric 1880s; this un-Austrian Austrian and un-Jewish Jew (Joseph Roth – who has ...”

“... recalling his childhood. He was born in 1913, to an illiterate, fatherless family on a working-class estate in eastern Algeria. ‘I was poised midway between poverty and sunshine,’ he wrote, and it wasn’t until he saw what it was like to live in a cold climate that he understood social injustice. Poverty was proof that history is unfair: the sun was a ...”

“... ponies, boarding school, a stint training as a Montessori teacher and in 1924 the award of a first-class degree in psychology from University College London. She was 26 in December 1926 when, feeling obscurely dissatisfied with her life, she decided to keep a diary in which she tried to establish ‘a method for discovering one’s true likes and ...”

“... the growth of American power had failed. He died six weeks later. At the end of the Second World War, many thought that a lasting peace would be possible only if we learned to manage the world economy. The fact that the worst war in history had followed shortly on the heels of the worst economic crisis seemed to confirm ...”

“... pastime’ of baseball, the Western is a sacred part of America’s post-Civil War national mythology – a shared language, a unifying set of symbols and metaphors, and a paradigm of (mainly male) behaviour. But where baseball is all form, the Western is heavy on content. Essentially, as Philip French once observed, it is ‘America ...”

“... hierarchical rigidities of feudalism which disfigured early modern Europe. Thus in the long run class resentments did not surface in the United States, which avoided the polarities of Right and Left. Instead, political parties evolved as broad non-ideological coalitions, with ‘wheeling and dealing, log-rolling and compromise’ the standard idiom of the ...”

“... size of cars. The streets are Haussmann-wide: Pyongyang was almost totally destroyed in the Korean War of 1950-53 and rebuilt by Soviet architects. Their influence is most pronounced on Kwangbok and Changchun Streets, which are as wide as bomber landing strips, with buildings a kilometre wide and a dozen storeys high running alongside them. I desperately ...”

“... Humboldtian language about the spiritual and higher ends of education! After the Second World War, Hutchins’s emotional energy was directed towards warnings about the dangers of nuclear research. Ironically, he was President at Chicago when the nation’s first atomic reactor was constructed in secret beneath the west stands of Stagg Field as part of ...”

“... as Britain exploited the manpower and natural resources of the empire during the Second World War. But the idea of importing colonial labour into metropolitan Britain, let alone the fear of uncontrolled and voluntary ‘coloured immigration’, had scarcely entered the establishment mind.It was the lack of that anxiety which made possible what Patel calls ...”