“... North Caucasus, but almost none from Central Asia. This shouldn’t be a surprise. During the Cold War some Kremlinologists claimed that the region was more prone to dissent and rebellion because its Muslim population was inherently anti-communist. The US and other Western governments expanded their broadcasts to Central Asia during the Soviet occupation of ...”

“... no longer feel at ease in each other’s company. The story of one family from al-Khudat, a middle-class Sunni neighbourhood in west Baghdad, explains why the city is going to remain divided. The victims in this case were Shia, but what happened to them, and how they reacted to it, is typical of refugee families elsewhere in Iraq. The family had lived in ...”

“... with which Beckett had some acquaintance in real life, when towards the end of the Second World War in Nazi-occupied France, he and his wife scrabbled about for a few carrots or onions along with the rest of the half-starved population. The tramps of Waiting for Godot (though who says they are tramps?) are similarly reduced to hoarding the odd ...”

“... Plato thought the ideal state would have a population of just 5040: ‘numbers enough for war and peace, and for all contracts and dealings’. Aristotle believed large states to be ‘almost incapable of constitutional government’, and that large populations carried the risk of foreigners blending in and acquiring the rights of citizens. The ...”

“... in Western historiography: the multigenerational contention over the causes of the First World War. This began before the war itself, as the statesmen chiefly involved in starting it forged arguments exonerating themselves and inculpating their adversaries, arguments that would later resonate in the works of ...”

“... words of regret will strike most readers as welcome and overdue. To unrepentant apologists of the war, by contrast, they have the feel of apostasy and betrayal. The question is: does Fukuyama tell us anything that we don’t already know? Can he explain how ‘the irresponsible exercise of American power’ became ‘one of the chief problems in contemporary ...”

“... America: the spectre of anti-Communism. In a word, Vietnam. Only three weeks into the bombing war in Afghanistan, the dreaded word ‘quagmire’ headed a New York Times piece by the Vietnam-era commentator R.W. Apple Jr, pointing out the ‘many echoes’ between the new conflict and the war America tries hard to ...”

“... roll: Daryl Derek Randy Kevin. He divides the classroom in two. We are going to fight the Civil War again.Liberation Day, down to the title, is a spiritual successor to Saunders’s last collection, 2013’s Tenth of December. (That long ago, really? Well, he was busy becoming an international institution.) At first, it doesn’t seem to progress much ...”

“... journey on the Metropolitan, knowing that from 1910 until the start of the Second World War commuters – and returning theatregoers – could for sixpence travel in one of the company’s Underground Pullmans, and as the train clanked along be served meals in a mahogany dining-room behind green damask curtains. We passed Neasden. When the first ...”

“... century BCe, in which a blameless Helen goes not with Paris to Troy but to Egypt to wait out the war. Part of H.D.’s task in the poem is to integrate seemingly disparate plots and structures of desire, via a kind of psychoanalytic interrogation with Theseus, a Freud-figure.H.D.’s several novels also ring variations on names, as if curled within the name ...”

“... the army, but Dronamraju has little to say about Haldane’s experiences during the First World War, which is surprising given the war’s importance in undermining the red scientists’ confidence in the 19th-century version of progress. Haldane joined the Black Watch, taught officers how to use hand grenades, and was ...”

“... former executive editor of the New York Times, as WikiLeaks’ US partner for the Afghan and Iraq war logs and the outlet for its diplomatic cables. As Chase Madar explains in The Passion of Bradley Manning, none of the material that Manning allegedly leaked is top secret. Out of roughly 250,000 diplomatic cables, for instance, 15,000 to 16,000 are ...”

“... after Senator Joseph Lieberman had cheerfully announced that it was a suitable target for war and occupation. The sad underwear bomber who tried to blow up the Amsterdam flight on Christmas Day had triggered a new interest in the country, and in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), by claiming that while he was converted to hardcore Islamism in ...”

“... ends of the social spectrum yet both firmly in Mugabe’s camp: the veterans of the liberation war and the small but growing number of indigenous businesses, hitherto the main beneficiaries of independence under majority rule. At the end of the liberation war in 1980, 20,000 guerrillas had been incorporated into the ...”

“... the British Isles, once largely covered with dense forest and occupied by a tribespeople fierce in war and given to cannibalism, and now, when you drive through or fly over, seen to be cleared and farmed, swamps drained, rivers dammed for hydro-electricity, lakes created, harbours and cities and roads and airports built – all orderly and productive, most of ...”