“... the Middle East. The uprisings of the Arab Spring have so far produced anarchy in Libya, a civil war in Syria, greater autocracy in Bahrain and resumed dictatorial rule in Egypt. In Syria, the uprising began in March 2011 with demonstrations against the brutality of Assad’s regime. ‘Peace! Peace!’ protesters chanted. But ‘if there was a fair election ...”

“... 1937, the events of that year have always seemed mysterious in a way that is not true of the Civil War, where the revolutionary regime fought for its existence, or even of Collectivisation, where the Soviet leadership waged terrible war on a section of the population that was deemed to stand in the way of its main political ...”

“... of Lords, and the disproportionately heavy losses suffered by the landed élite in the First World War. The result was that most landowners stopped building houses or buying land; there were massive sales of acres and mansions immediately before and after the First World War; and in the 1930s the actual demolition of country ...”

“... and outside the country, that his fall would precipitate widespread sectarian violence, even civil war. His success is chiefly due to a foreign policy, pioneered by his father, that allows the Baathist regime to portray itself as a linchpin of regional stability and security. Since coming to power after his father’s death in 2000, the younger Assad has ...”

“... hands one a copy of Esquire for April featuring ‘The Hitler Formula: Out of the Ashes of World War Two and onto the Best-Seller List in 14 Easy Steps’, which in a two-page spread sums up the rules of the genre. Step One: arrange any six of the elements below in a six-inch-by-nine-inch space and red, black and white decor: Nazi flag, eagle, swastika, iron ...”

“... liberals, New Dealers and American Stalinists – has been so neglected is thanks not just to Cold War Anti-Communism and the postwar economic boom, but to the triumph of the Trotskyist Partisan Review Modernists, now known as the ‘New York intellectuals’. (In his New Conservative baedeker, The Rise of a Counter-Establishment, the ...”

“... demonstrator, opposed to the métèques, to the immigrants who for good or ill had in those inter-war years become part of France. Nothing as yet that might foreshadow the future leader of the nation’s Left. Nothing, unless it was an unyielding drive for social advancement, decked out in the Florentine graces of a Machiavellianism that aimed higher than the ...”

“... to the criminal excess of an idea on the march. Whether the idea is the triumph of the working class or of a master race, ideology leads to the graveyard. Although liberal-minded intellectuals have repeatedly mobilised some version of this argument against the isms of right and left, they have seldom mustered a comparable scepticism about that other idée ...”

“... This step was not as obvious or inevitable as it may now appear. Americans before the Second World War spoke less of the country’s exceptional primacy than of its exceptional aloofness from European-style power politics. They prided themselves on being above espionage, diplomatic intrigue and standing armies; they preferred to speak of international legal ...”

“... Mendoza has transformed the corruption, chaos and constant bloodletting of Mexico’s disastrous War on Drugs into blackly comic fiction. He is best known for a series set in his home town of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, heartland of Mexico’s most powerful cartel. Silver Bullets, the first instalment, came out in Spanish in 2008, followed by La ...”

“... and its subtitle might have been spoken by the prophet Isaiah: ‘Peace to the Cottages! War on the Palaces!’ This slogan went straight into the German radical tradition and, from there, into folkmemory and cliché. I had always assumed that the words came straight from Büchner’s heart; Friede den Hütten! Krieg den Palästen! But when I read ...”

“... trop tard pour l’histoire de la Révolution Française.’ He was, of course, wrong. The post-war generation, Cobb, Rudé, Soboul, Tönnesson, focusing upon popular movements, the Parisian working populace and the thugs who made a reality of the Terror in the provinces, found plenty to absorb their attention. In addition, a long tradition of studies of ...”

“... how far Napoleon can still be taken – even in France – is less clear. Up to the First World War, the strength or weakness of Bonapartism was usually a potent indicator of how French men and women responded to their nation. Thus Napoleon’s improved reputation in the 1830s (his body was brought back in triumph from St Helena in 1840) pointed towards the ...”

“... behind an unusual tripartite screen. Circling the city stood isolated funerary towers – upper-class family tombs several storeys high, built in the early years of the city’s prosperity but in use throughout its history. They could each hold hundreds of bodies in individual niches racked up in side passages off the central corridors on each floor, all ...”

“... burnt flesh of his child. Till Achilles is as mortal as he.’ To preserve him from the coming war with Troy, Thetis disguises her teenage son as a girl and hides him among the women at the Court of King Lycomedes on the island of Skiros. Deidamia, the princess, sees through the disguise and seduces him. Eventually Odysseus, Nestor and Ajax come looking ...”