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“... much against the great imperial structures that disappeared piece by piece after the Second World War; now, after years of degeneration following the white man’s departure, the empires that ruled Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad. The perplexingly affirmative work of Niall Ferguson and David Armitage scants, if it doesn’t actually trivialise, the ...”

“... for Britain to take over the Congo, Angola and Mozambique ‘at this stage’. During the civil war in the Congo in 1961 several Rhodesian whites clearly had their eye on Katanga as a possible new province. Expansionary British imperialism wasn’t quite dead. Even less dead was the idea that white men were the only people who could rule black people ...”

“... Towards the end of 1688 the Dutch Republic tried to bounce Britain into war with France by main military force. The chief plotter was a scion of the royal house of Orange-Nassau and nephew and son-in-law to the British king, but he had none of the poise and magnificence that were supposed to go with a royal pedigree ...”

“... scruffy. The two men are from very different backgrounds, though without much contrast of social class: Adamsberg is from Béarn in the south-west while Danglard’s ancestors were miners in the east. Adamsberg remains earthy, thinking more productively when near water and stone. His touch has a strongly calming effect, on people but also on ...”

“... as well known as he should be or (we’re safe to assume) would like to be. Tim Shipman in All Out War, to date the fullest and most reliable account of the campaign, describes him as ‘one of the most eloquent’ of the Tory Europhobes. Political uncertainty has never been his problem. In his various capacities as think-tank director, Daily Telegraph ...”

“... coverage of Iran epitomised these attitudes. Khomeini, medieval, despotic, wages ‘holy war’ upon the world in an attempt to drag his homeland back into the seventh century AD. The unstated assumption, of course, is that Westernisation equals modernity, and that developing countries must needs transform themselves into ‘mini-Americas’. Any ...”

“... that all men are created equal’ had experienced ‘a new birth of freedom’ in civil war. But with the defeat of Reconstruction a decade after Lincoln’s assassination, the 14th Amendment that was supposed to guarantee former slave ‘persons’ equality before the law came instead to insulate corporations, designated ‘artificial ...”

“... but not all English ones, which could use the same subtitle. The Waves, or The World of School, War and Peace, or The World of School, A Passage to India, or ... ? Brighton Rock? Le Grand Meaulnes? A clear case would be Brideshead Revisited, where Brideshead is obviously the name of the school itself. Even today, almost everyone has the school ...”

“... in 1903, a bizarre title for a girl of 19, and Beatified in 1909, when France was drifting towards war; drifting also into infidelity, which might be checked by a distinction conferred on the embodiment of French patriotism. Personified France and canonised Joan are both enigmatic figures. With Joan, Marina Warner has succeeded as well as anyone could in ...”

“... protest movement, now nearly three years old. In October 1934, in the build-up to the Civil War, a workers’ alliance of socialists, anarchists and communists overcame their usually fractious divisions to oppose the entry of three members of the quasi-fascist CEDA into the government. Workers’ militias marched from the mining villages towards ...”

“... exactly with the long Edwardian age, remembered as a last idyllic summer before the Great War. Those years were in fact politically troubled and the weather not especially good but childhoods like hers gave substance to the myth. The early letters to her adored mother and other relatives are redolent of picnics and pinafores, nursery teas, ponies and ...”

“... be poignantly contrasted with real life in Liverpool. Envy, nostalgia, anti-élitism, a touch of class-battling – it could be just like old times. There is a real review to be conducted of Britain’s diplomacy, but it would not be much fun. It has nothing to do with the staffing levels of embassies, the cost of entertainment allowances, or whether the ...”

“... involving children abused till they died. These were reported in the press, especially the middle-class Neue Frei Presse, in a tone suggesting that such horrors were previously unheard of. The reports were sometimes sentimentalised – this is what can happen when country girls come to the wicked city – but also sanitised for the bourgeoisie, represented as ...”

“... powers and the USSR started by producing and stockpiling nuclear weapons as a deterrent to general war. The idea seemed simple enough. Because of the enormous amount of destruction that could be wreaked by a single nuclear explosion, the idea was that both sides in what we still see as an East-West conflict would be deterred from taking any aggressive action ...”

“... rule for more than a century before becoming part of the new Polish state after the First World War. His was a Jewish family that lived in a non-Jewish section of the city and spoke Polish at home. His father – an unsuccessful businessman, later an accountant – was a Zionist, but it was his lively mother who set the tone, and she had been ‘brought up ...”