“... government of 1936-37. Already a prominent writer and government lawyer before the First World War, he led the French Socialists (officially called the French Section of the Workers’ International) for most of the interwar period. And he achieved his success despite appearing to French gentiles more conspicuously Jewish than nearly all other prominent ...”

“... resigned prematurely from the Foreign Office at the age of 49, shortly before the First World War. He was the senior British diplomat in Seoul and resigned, my father told me, because he objected to British support for Japan’s occupation of Korea. It was a reckless and somewhat mysterious decision: he was about to achieve ambassadorial rank, had no ...”

“... reads like Haddad’s code for 'fictionalise'. Otherwise, this smells like a set-up. Hasn’t the war in Iraq and its limitless dark fallout put paid to the sentiment of do-goodism and conventional notions of ‘truth’ and the ‘power of words’, particularly America-inspired ones? Rasa’s reflections come in a scene, early on, when he is trying to ...”

“... from such recent books as Jeremiah Dancy’s The Myth of the Press Gang and Isaac Land’s War, Nationalism and the British Sailor, but it does not suit his purpose to follow their arguments in detail, or to enter into the controversies which in some cases they have aroused. He writes mainly about warships (merchant ships are more difficult to study ...”

“... he ended his speech by arguing that Israelis had to prepare themselves for a permanent and bitter war, which would have a major role for what Israel called ‘frontier settlements’.Over the years, the ploughed ditch turned into a complex system of fortifications – a 300-metre buffer zone, where more than two hundred Palestinian demonstrators were shot and ...”

“... The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the pirates’ patron), Charles I and, not least, Oliver Cromwell. The ...”

“... but famine was averted; instead, as they saw their savings evaporate, Russians witnessed a civil war on the streets of their cities. Before Chechnya, before Turkmenistan, there was the war in Moscow, Petersburg and Yeltsin’s hometown of Ekaterinberg. Well-armed gangs were at one another’s throats, and you never knew ...”

“... families, earning somewhere between $18,576 and $74,304. But this isn’t a rising middle class. In the last six years of the Eighties, it shrank from 71 per cent of all families to 63 per cent. Looked at another way again, the wealth of all but the richest 1 per cent declined on average in these years by a percentage point a year. Real incomes also ...”

“... legal adviser, William Pyne, and to his tailor, Richard Culverwell. There has been a long upper-class tradition of owing money to one’s tailor – which, no doubt, explains the inordinate prices charged in those days. Disraeli, characteristically, went a step further and actually borrowed money from his tailor, who, like most of Disraeli’s ...”

“... One new thread is nationalistic, even xenophobic, in the years when Europe was drifting towards war and Britain was engaged in a naval arms race with Germany. Hugh Owen, in The Poison Cloud (1908), blames his exterminating fog on the import of cheap, noxious foreign coal (disloyal British miners who strike have destroyed the native industry), and it is the ...”

“... with the worst of the breaking and burning done and an inkling of confidence among the political class that the ‘crisis’ is surmountable, Nicolas Sarkozy – who’d begun to look isolated in the government – has seen his position steadily improve. The public, no longer quite so nervous, has rewarded him for his outspokenness with a boost in his ...”

“... take it to the next cradle. It’s after Ursula has experienced for herself the end of the war in Berlin that she takes the decision to assassinate Hitler before he can become Chancellor. The moment of her death in 1945 seems to be a moment of particular insight. In a ruined Berlin, she decides to kill herself and her daughter (it’s the only timeline ...”

“... already censored themselves in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), using carefully coded terms for class struggle and capitalism; subsequently Adorno took his name off the (excellent) book he had written with Eisler on cinema music, Composing for the Films (1947). Eisler went on to write the DDR’s national anthem, while Adorno’s trenchant opposition to ...”

“... the political order today. In this version, the First Republic that emerged at the end of the war collapsed, amid dramatic convulsions, in the early 1990s. Out of its demise a more modern configuration has emerged, still incomplete, but already a critical improvement on its predecessor. It is the full accomplishment of this Second Republic, for which ...”

“... offer and opportunity touted in the advertisement pages of the comics he reads, goes with his class to visit a Wall Street firm with which his class teacher, Mrs Joubert, is connected. Between them they have saved up enough money for a single share in the business, and naturally the firm seizes on the opportunity to ...”