“... In the spring​ of 1975, as America’s war in Vietnam drew to its grim conclusion, a new magazine targeted readers who did not want it to end. Soldier of Fortune was founded by Robert K. Brown, a former Green Beret based in Boulder, Colorado, who made the profitable discovery that his publication could double as an employment agency for mercenaries and a weaponry catalogue ...”

“... more effectively by Britain and France. In response to the invasion, Sultan Abdulmejid I declared war on Russia, and Britain and France sent ships to the Bosphorus to protect him against attack. On 30 November 1853, Russian missiles destroyed the Ottoman navy in the Black Sea. The British and French press lamented their countries’ humiliation. In March ...”

“... the illegals in immigrant neighbourhoods; it targets those who have strayed into middle and upper-class areas, where the residents are less welcoming. Dawners generally don’t kill. They break a few limbs in lightning-quick strikes. Last September a Dawn truck driver stabbed an Athenian rapper named Pavlos Fyssas to death in Piraeus. The uncharacteristic ...”

“... of professional philosophers, take as their frame of reference the ancient doctrine of the just war which has inspired most attempts to create international laws of war. Resort to force should have a cause sufficiently just to override the moral ugliness of war. There should be a ...”

“... has spun off various lengthy by-products, such as a 732-page study of The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-volume edition of Eisenhower’s war papers, and special studies of Eisenhower and Berlin and even Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment. Dr Ambrose’s ...”

“... In 2001, Blair told the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had been investigating Putin’s war crimes in Chechnya, that ‘it’s my job as prime minister to like Mr Putin.’ (Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow in 2006, on Putin’s birthday.) In Putin’s People, Catherine Belton describes many occasions when the Russian president was confirmed in ...”

“... had anything to teach the West was eradicated, Haslam tells us, by the Soviet victory in World War Two. When Carr began writing his monumental History of Soviet Russia in the 1950s, the Soviet Union could be seen as a striking success story, with rising industrial output and improving living standards. Born into the middle ...”

“... Alun Lewis is usually remembered as a war poet or, more precisely, as a soldier poet. ‘All Day It Has Rained’ is familiar to those who know nothing else about its author and to some who don’t usually read poetry. Ian Hamilton edited a selection of Lewis’s work, and there is a good biography by John Pikoulis ...”

“... have an opinion about it. Lancaster was no egalitarian, he mourned the passing of the upper middle class and the dwindling influence of the Anglican church, but he had the English dislike of experts and ‘the vast army of salaried culture-hounds’ who had introduced to Britain that hitherto exclusively foreign concept, the intelligentsia. Pundits, he ...”

“... brains and poison raindrops. The scenario might have seemed twee and over-familiar – middle-class person escapes to the countryside to find himself – were it not for Buckmaster’s madness, and his desire to be madder still. ‘Perhaps I am losing my mind,’ he says: ‘I do hope so.’ He isn’t only running away, he’s trying to find ...”

“... secret’, like the recipe for Coca-Cola. And she formed a corporate board ready to go to war with Quest and LabCorp: Henry Kissinger; Sam Nunn, who had served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; George Shultz, the former secretary of state, one of the begetters of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive ...”

“... to explain why Britain’s great commerical rival of the 17th century had deteriorated to second-class status by the mid-18th. Her answers amount to an account of missed opportunities, of rulers who lacked the will to power, and of citizens who refused to pay the financial price of greatness. It is a didactic exercise in which Tuchman occasionally displays ...”

“... to death. Another 162 had been injured, many of them maimed for life. Most were young and working-class. Many were of Irish origin. Not a single one of them could by any stretch of the imagination be held responsible for or even sympathetic to British government policy in Northern Ireland. The universal horror at this, the biggest killing of civilians in ...”

“... who would go on to present their own take on the nuclear threat, in a sketch called ‘Civil War’.In that sketch, a worried Moore listens trustingly as a succession of posh-voiced government spokesmen seek to reassure him that all the appropriate measures are in place in the event of a nuclear attack. When he voices disbelief that a four-minute warning ...”

“... and from Christ’s Hospital to St John’s. After Oxford, he became a schoolmaster; during the war, he rose from lance-corporal in the Intelligence Corps to captain in the Education Corps. While Jay was using the City page of the Daily Herald to make propaganda against appeasement, Stewart was teaching economics to sixth-formers; while Jay was helping to ...”