“... 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 ...”

“... from one space of tragedy to the next as if it were a suite of rooms, a suite of traumas, from war to revolution, to famine and mass persecution, and on to new wars, new persecutions – the territory for this hybrid memory formed earlier than in other countries: spiralling, multiplying versions of what has happened to us over the last hundred ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mrs Siddons, but more to the political ferment and cultural turbulence of the age itself, with its war of competing national images and ideologies in the aftermath of victorious foreign war, its personal rivalries, fluctuating prosperity and burgeoning inequality, all of which cartoonists and newspapermen could portray on a ...”

“... peace plan of 1987, are, and have been since their creation, in a state of near-anarchy or civil war. Why this huge discrepancy between Protestant North and Catholic South? It is a question which must confront even the most unreflective observer as she travels southwards from the United States. Those who have tried to answer it have generally done so in ...”

“... to flee to Moscow, that just by being there he indirectly achieved victories in the intelligence war beyond the KGB’s wildest dreams. Supporters of the second view, and I am one, argue that Philby was instrumental in paralysing Western intelligence operations against the Soviet Union for ten years, that he ruined the careers of some of the CIA’s finest ...”

“... this. For him, as for, say, a group like the Tel Quel group in Paris, criticism is part of the class struggle, an attempt to overthrow the bourgeoisie and ‘the dominant culture’. He announces a battle to come: ‘If “Leavisism” still constitutes a “problem” for the dominant culture, how can it have ceased to disturb the vulnerable, minoritarian ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Pinochet Ugarte’s defeat in Chile’s 1989 elections was enormous. In Latin America, Cold War pressures had combined with local authoritarianism to produce four decades of right-wing dictatorships. Pinochet’s was the most notorious and the last to give way. With his departure, the entire region, with the exception of Cuba and Haiti, came under ...”

“... off with Robert Dole, the quintessential tough-guy white male candidate, the wounded veteran (= ‘war hero’ in current parlance), a man’s man of few words, the Convention would have been a total failure if it had unfolded as a celebration of manly virtues. That would only have satisfied the white males and anti-feminist white females who will vote for ...”

“... from their dead father (in life, one of the first drivers to be fined for speeding). During World War Two, Vichyite psychics joined forces with a London medium and a Himalayan astral brotherhood to relay messages from Conan Doyle, who reported an afterlife spent attending birthday parties and family reunions. The spiritualist crusade, which embarrassed ...”

“... achieve a religious concordat with Serbia in 1914, Pacelli helped pave the way for the First World War seems absurd. Any Catholic diplomat (Pacelli was then undersecretary of state in the Vatican) would have done the same and he could hardly be blamed for the secular frenzy which followed. But Cornwell has delved to much effect – his book surpasses all ...”

“... he spoke with an almost imperceptible ‘accent du Midi’ – to a standard-issue, lower-middle-class, left-of-centre, anti-clerical family. He was very successful as a young man, a golden boy to the ‘radical-socialist’ (which was neither radical nor socialist) establishment that ran France – not very successfully – in the last decades of the Third ...”