“... Ewan, to war widowhood in her early twenties, with a little son. In Cloud Howe she marries Robert, a war veteran and Church of Scotland minister, and moves to Segget, a nearby mill town, where Robert dies as his hopes die, for the General Strike of 1926 and for a child of his own. By the time of Grey ...”

“... the 1951 film adaptation of Show Boat. When the sheriff arrives to arrest Steve Baker (played by Robert Sterling) for being married to Julie LaVerne (played by Ava Gardner), the leading lady in a riverboat revue who we learn has ‘negro blood’, he pricks her finger, sucks her blood and proclaims that he now has ‘negro blood’ too. In Mississippi, where ...”

“... the Battle of Britain, before seeing action in the battle of Tunis, the invasion of Sicily and the conquest of Italy. In 1945 he became the youngest brigadier in the British army, dislodging Enoch Powell from that position. Macmillan liked to be surrounded by men who had seen real action, just as he never got used to the company of appeasers. He was one of ...”

“... World War. Fascism promised national rebirth through the violent cleansing of enemies at home and conquest abroad; to achieve this required public consent to the undoing of democracy. Where fascism took root, it grew rapidly beyond its base among the frustrated lower middle classes, attracting support from ‘the politically homeless … the socially ...”

“... and, as Taoiseach, he decided to make public money available for this. The project was taken on by Robert Dudley Edwards from University College Dublin, who promised that a book, one thousand pages long, made up of essays by various experts, would be in print by 1946. The Government released a grant of £1500. Over the next few years Edwards worked with a ...”

“... a rare moment of apparent inadvertence, he paradoxically classifies the Norman monarchy after the Conquest as absolutist. There have been so many perverse claims for English exceptionalism in this period that it would be churlish to make too much of this contradiction. But it points to a more general problem. The tacit modulation from society to state in the ...”

“... by the covenant of the League of Nations that Wilson winched into it. With British helpmeets – Robert Cecil, Walter Phillimore – assisting, it was this initiative that gave rise to the spirit of Geneva. Lauding the League as the first international organisation for peace in which smaller powers set the tone, Ghervas is at pains to clear it of customary ...”

“... England’, and the town earned a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on women’s sweated labour, Robert Harborough Sherard’s White Slaves of England. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cradley Heath was known as the world’s capital of hand-hammered chain-making, and boasted, somewhat weirdly, that the anchor chain of the Titanic had been manufactured ...”

“... through missionary commitment: this shared sensibility also intensified the craving for conquest within Israel’s leadership and among its American defenders. There are many reasons war fever has raged out of control, as Homeland brilliantly shows, but the millenarian worldview contributed to igniting the conflagration. How else can we explain the ...”

“... The conquest​ of most of the North American continent by Anglophone settlers took roughly three hundred years, from the first stake at Jamestown to the last bullet at Wounded Knee. The Spanish had subdued a much vaster population of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Peru in just under half a century and expected to repeat the formula, mobilising the Indigenous tributaries against the Indigenous core as they moved up from their outposts in Florida, only to find there was no power centre to replace ...”

“... in Ethiopia. On resigning his post in 1937, Pilotti took part in the celebrations in Genoa of the conquest of Ethiopia; and during the Second World War headed the high court of occupied Ljubljana after Italy’s annexation of Slovenia, where resistance was met with mass deportations, concentration camps, and police and military repression. The German judge on ...”

“... tune of about £650,000. Between Agnew’s place and Sandringham is Houghton Hall, family seat of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, now the home of David, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, Lord Great Chamberlain and beneficiary of £260,000 in subsidies. The land Agnew’s house stands on was part, until relatively recently, of Marquess ...”

“... a matter of months before the Corbett-Ashley case by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who proposed the distinction in his 1968 study, Sex and Gender – the second volume was called The Transsexual Experiment. For Stoller, gender was identity, sex was genital pleasure, and humans would always give priority to the first (many ...”

“... Ottomans’ victory over the Mamluk sultanate in the battle of Marj Dabiq opened the way for their conquest of the Arab lands. In Islamic eschatology, Dabiq is one of the two possible locations of a battle between Muslims and an invading Christian army which the Muslims will win, their victory marking the beginning of the end of days. Dabiq is the title of ...”

“... antiquity been Greek in population and culture, with a Turkish minority introduced after Ottoman conquest in the 16th century. But in the 19th century, distant four hundred miles from Greece, it remained unaffected by the national awakening that produced, first Greek independence itself, then successive risings against Ottoman rule in Crete and its union ...”