“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... LRB in 1993, this ‘drove young men into outlawry’.Prisoner exchanges during the Second World War remain underexplored. Convoluted negotiations between the Allies and the Axis, conducted through the Red Cross, began in 1940 but were so drawn out that few prisoners were swapped using this channel. Only a small number of Germans were in Allied captivity in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... unified the squad.The ‘woke’ v. ‘sus’ conflict is a symptom of Sean’s broader class confusion. If the ‘sus’ means tasteless or offensive things tolerated in certain (working-class, male) company but also sketchy or actually bad behaviour, ‘woke’ indicates a separate code adopted by his ...”

“... addicts: people can become hooked on real-life crime stories, just as they can on pornography and war books. Readers who are not broadly addicted to the whole subject may turn to the interviews that reflect their own criminal experience – and ask difficult questions of their own. Just before Christmas, I was mugged in Hackney. Returning from a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... insight with meticulous scholarship. He is perhaps the unique example in modern times of a world-class physicist turned historian. His first excursion into the history of science was his life of Einstein. The book was widely acclaimed by scientists, but less enthusiastically received by some historians who, while not denying Pais’s mastery of the ...”

“... pumped with a pint of HIV-infected semen; the arms dealer who supplied both sides in the Iran-Iraq war is bled to death, in allusion to Teheran’s Martyrs’ Fountain. All these retributions are narrated autobiographically and without identification in such a way as to hint to the reader that Colley may himself be the vigilante with a socialist ...”

“... itself from the collective, eventually revealing himself as very unlike his fellows. The tug-of-war between that ‘I’ and ‘we’, and the turbulence within the ‘we’, provides much of the book’s tension. Walter came to the village 12 years previously as the manservant of Master Kent, lord of the manor by right of marriage. The hierarchy between ...”

“... Begin’s was a social revolution, based on promises of social change and on giving the working class, which the Labour Party had alienated, a sense of belonging. Begin carried out a social revolution, but used the ‘train ticket’ he received from the people to travel to the Occupied Territories. I would like to be the Menachem Begin of the Labour ...”

“... On 3 October 1922 Percy Thompson, a shipping clerk and old member of the Stepney Elocution Class, was stabbed to death in the street near his home in Ilford. His wife, Edith, was with him; her lover and former lodger, Frederick Bywaters, was the attacker. These circumstances were not disputed when the couple were charged with Thompson’s murder ...”