“... seeming a ‘spoiled child of history’ – but he was old and ill, queasily supportive of the war effort and moved by his memory of the young man on the river ‘with his felicities all most promptly divinable’. Under the circumstances, he told Edward Marsh, the poet’s literary executor, he had read Brooke’s ...”

“... and his insistence that he wasn’t part of a ‘plot’. That was an obvious suspicion: working-class discontent seethed at the time, and was manifested in the outpouring of popular ‘applause and hurrahs for Bellingham’ that greeted the news of the assassination when it reached the streets. After the event, radicals took Bellingham to their hearts. At ...”

“... and acacia trees are now growing in the Babur Garden, which was obliterated in the civil war. The owner of a well-stocked corner shop, wearing a clean, crisp pirahan, or long-tailed shirt, is courteousness itself. Mostly, however, I searched for a bridge away from this Kabul, for something to suggest that now is not the norm, but the aberration. The ...”

“... Benghazi and heavy with men looking for work. I took a seat on the wooden benches of the first-class section. Over in the VIP lounge, the Chinese businessmen from my flight were relaxing over an ample supply of alcohol. But we had entertainment too, flickering across a small TV screen: a dramatic re-enactment of the capture and rescue of some Royal Irish ...”

“... culture of antiquity, however much its existence may have been predicated on the Roman imperial war machine, was fundamentally civilian in outlook and affect; the fifth century witnessed its catastrophic impoverishment and the triumph of a military world where martial success was the main currency. For the general reader, Attila is a byword for ...”

“... of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which wasn’t published in the US until after the Second World War. Orwell celebrated the anarchists in Barcelona, who had been opposed by both the Americans and the Soviets. Struck by the contrast between Orwell’s account and the hostile reports in the established press, Chomsky began to develop a sense of the way the ...”

“... at the foot of Black Mountain, the highest peak in the state. By the start of the Second World War, more than ten thousand people were living in Lynch, and the mines, which employed four thousand, were among the most productive in the world. In a single nine-hour shift, workers could extract and prepare for shipping more than twelve thousand tons of ...”

“... followers that the Maronites were coming for them. What started as a political rebellion with a class dimension quickly turned into a sectarian conflict. By the spring of 1860, Mount Lebanon had erupted into civil war. In May, Druze fighters attacked several Maronite strongholds, burning villages and killing Christians in ...”

“... Mira Schendel – born Myrrha Dagmar Dub in 1919 in Zurich, brought up in Italy, uprooted by war to Yugoslavia, and from there to Brazil in 1949 – is moving, difficult, full of strange writing and immediate visual pleasure.* Schendel was an intellectual, feeding on Wittgenstein and Cardinal Newman (her two incompatible heroes), as well as a constant ...”

“... his philosophy, style and historical method. In so doing, Cannadine plunges into several dangerous war zones, political, cultural and academic. He starts by dismissing the common charge that Trevelyan was the unreflecting mouthpiece of progressive Whiggism at prayer, arguing that Trevelyan’s political beliefs substantially evolved over his lifetime and were ...”

“... Middle East, Africa and South-East Asia, and cannon-fodder on a heroic scale in the First World War, when 1.3 million mustered for Asquith and Lloyd George. But its primary function remained domestic intimidation, the maintenance of British rule by threat or exercise of force. Laid out across the country, its cantonments were a permanent reminder of what ...”

“... European vacations were ‘a mainstay of her childhood … She was comfortable travelling first class and dressing in a formal gown for dinner aboard an opulent ocean liner.’ Such luxury was not an end in itself: edification was. When as a teenager Rich attended a private school, ‘her favourite feeling was “that of having accomplished ...”

“... the Ottoman Empire, was to have its capital. It is where, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the most politically developed and socially radical version of the dream of Arab unity was conceived by the founders of the Arab Socialist Baath (‘resurrection’) Party. Syria is also the terminus of the Arab Spring. The country today is in ruins: there ...”

“... prisoners) has recourse to homosexuality merely because nothing else is on tap. Similarly, working-class boys no longer have an automatic respect for ‘gentlemen’ like Gide nor do they unquestioningly submit to their whims. Certainly Gide would never be considered a great ‘moralist’ today. Yet his reputation lingers on; in France the idée reçue about ...”

“... she acquired a driver’s licence, a fancy car and a number of lovers. In 1939, on the brink of war, she married Robert Antelme. The following year, it became illegal for most married women to work. Duras stayed at home and tried to write, but Gallimard rejected her first novel, which after much rewriting was published by Plon in 1943 as Les ...”