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“... colleges had been forced to shut down early in the wake of the Kent State massacre; anti-war protesters battled construction workers in the streets of New York; self-proclaimed political prisoners attempted bloody escapes; middle-class students planted bombs and robbed banks. In August that year, Richard Nixon took ...”

“... Schwindelns’, a chronic deception or swindle. Hofmannsthal disdained the standard middle-class public for literature and theatre and no doubt opera (certainly he disdained the Strausses, whom he found severely trying in person, though he was delighted with the way Richard transformed his earning potential). Of impressively aristocratic bearing ...”

“... surrender monkeys’. As Howard shows, French diplomacy has been involved in a continuous war of manoeuvre against the Anglo-Saxons. Its existence has rarely been acknowledged, so Howard’s study is especially valuable; though there are some lacunae and a few mistakes it also contains a great deal of useful material. He starts with the confrontation ...”

“... that stuck was Cristina Campo. Her parents, Guido Guerrini and Emilia Putti, descended from upper-class families. Campo’s paternal grandmother was a countess. Her mother’s family, the Putti, had been influential in Bologna for centuries. Vittorio Putti, Campo’s uncle, was a world-famous orthopaedic surgeon. Campo was born with a heart defect: the ...”

“... wheat from the chaff. The basis of the story he has to tell lies in the two enormous changes the war brought to MI5 and MI6. The sheer necessity of national survival and the huge expansion of the services had the effect of bringing a whole new wave of highly talented intellectuals into the services, which, until then, had been the exclusive fief of ...”

“... Bruno Ahrends, like so many German-Jewish emigrés, was interned at the start of the Second World War as an ‘enemy alien’ – stuck for the duration in Douglas on the Isle of Man. There he created dream images straight out of the unbuilt projects of Weimar Berlin, monumental glass and concrete skyscrapers of the kind that would be realised only after the ...”

“... shoulder, like the disgusting foxes that rested around my mother’s neck. The 1950s, just after a war had ended, the children of a new era, the children playing in the bombsites of something that has never been imaginable. The Blitz, the sirens, the rubble. Born two years later and only a few bombsites remaining. Thrilling for us, warnings about all sorts of ...”

“... Hague and Arusha (for Rwanda), are an attempt to show that achieving justice for the victims of war crimes, of crimes against humanity and of massive political persecution is not simply a matter of satisfying the grievances of individual victims. By stating that they will pursue the perpetrators of such acts to the ends of the earth, the Tribunals are ...”

“... haunted him since his childhood. As a boy, he tells us, he grew up believing that the Second World War was ‘a just and moral crusade’ ending in a victory over tyranny. The British had fought in the expectation that ‘with victory would come justice: those who had done evil would be punished, and those who had died would be avenged.’ But as a man he came ...”

“... written of the novels, Washington, DC, covers the years of the Depression, New Deal, Second World War and Korea; and the final volume, The Golden Age, takes the story to the millennium, though for most of its almost five hundred pages, oddly, it covers the years from 1940 to 1950, reworking and amplifying the historical material covered by Washington, DC. Of ...”

“... gives her the wrong colour nail polish (‘Damn Miss Rose!’). Meanwhile she is ignorant of the war and events around her: ‘started to read a book but too nervous,’ ‘looked at the papers but nothing in them.’ Orton’s Susan is a sweeter and lighter presence, whose reactions to the events of her life are more naive than narcissistic. ‘I think ...”

“... relatively humble academic existence was, he acknowledges, largely a matter of luck. Early in the war, the British government realised that the key to the country’s survival would be its ability to secure supplies of food and raw materials, for much of which it would not be able to pay. The answer could only lie in assistance from the United States. Roll ...”

“... of topographical maps overpainted with emphatic information of other sorts. In one, Second World War bomb damage is recorded and in another Charles Booth details the wealth or poverty of households. Black indicates total destruction in the former and abject poverty in the latter; yellow indicates upper-class wealth and ...”

“... is just comic, especially at the start of the film. Bonaparte is shown at school during a class on ‘islands’ – amazing what destiny can do to a syllabus. Corsica is described as ‘half-civilised’, and Bonaparte stands up, outraged, controlling himself only with difficulty. Then the teacher says (or a title-card says for him): ‘Oh, I was ...”

“... Empson taught literature in Japan from 1931 to 1934, and in China from 1937 to 1939. After the war he returned to China for five years before settling into a life divided between Sheffield and London. In 1932 he fell in love with some eighth-century Buddhist statues in temples near Nara in Japan, ‘the only accessible Art I find myself able to care ...”