“... Fazzan in 1902, and now turned their energies on the Italians. Interrupted during the First World War, when Italian troops were needed elsewhere, this ‘pacification’ would continue until 1943, when the Allies finally pushed out the Italians and Germans after the battle of al-Alamein. In a brief section on the Italian period in A History of Modern Libya ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... into reassurance with the assumption that others sin and suffer because differences in time, class, sex, race or nationality make them different (and inferior) in essence. In any case, we needn’t take fictional people too seriously because they are, after all, unreal. Their mishaps can confirm our own sense of safety. No writer is less willing to ...”

“... victims of the Aids scourge. One cannot but note how often in Africa Aids appears to feed on war and civil strife – in Uganda, Ethiopia, the Sudan, Mozambique and Angola the coincidence is plain enough. It is not merely that all diseases spread faster among a war-weakened populace: ...”

“... provide the most reliable figures for the losses suffered by the Soviet Union in the Second World War – twenty-six to twenty-seven million, of whom ten million fell in battle or died in captivity; while the number of victims of the 1929-1952 repressions was 22 million. The first figure is correct, In the second, however, he has apparently failed to include ...”

“... British and Irish Governments as the writing on the wall. They give every sign of preparing for war. The cargo of arms from Poland, destined for Loyalist terrorists, contained, among other materiel, two tons of high explosive. This time British intelligence intercepted the freight. But what about last time? Brian Nelson, a Loyalist terrorist and army double ...”

“... gave Asad the chance to go to school in Latakia, an experience which encouraged a good measure of class resentment and a desire to take part in political and social reform. After school his career was shaped by his attachment to the Air Force and the Ba’th Party. According to Mr Seale, Asad’s ‘commitment to conspiracy’, together with a capacity for ...”

“... explain his reactions when he is in office? Then we are told that he is an example of the middle-class individual who has been denied any opportunity to realise himself as an important or meaningful member of society. Therefore he flees forward, he is always conscious of crises ahead, he is anxious to create issues if they do not arise of their own ...”

“... et la pitié, Marcel Ophuls’s stunning documentary of life in Clermont-Ferrand during World War Two. Her attention was caught by a clip showing Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Final Solution and Himmler’s deputy, shaking hands in May 1942 with Darquier de Pellepoix, charged by the German occupiers and the Vichy government with delivering ...”

“... the Pall Mall Gazette, he’d been able (he said) to ‘wreck cabinets [and] let loose a tide of war upon helpless populations’. He was responsible – in his own words – for ‘ministers driven into retirement, laws repealed, great social reforms initiated, bills transformed, estimates remodelled, acts passed, generals nominated, governors ...”

“... 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 ...”