“... Musab al-Zarqawi, denounces the Shia as apostates. There are also near daily massacres of working-class Shias. Now the Shias have started to strike back. The bodies of Sunnis are being found in rubbish dumps across Baghdad. ‘I was told in Najaf by senior leaders that they have killed upwards of a thousand Sunnis,’ an Iraqi official said. Often the killers ...”

“... late 19th-century England: in the world Haggard created the governing principle was survival, not class or intellect, and the rewards for bravery were blood (other people’s) and diamonds. Graham Greene said that he valued Haggard’s book ‘a good deal higher than Treasure Island’.The story follows the narrator Allan Quatermain – an elephant hunter ...”

“... of rebels, and the incarceration of dissidents in penal colonies. He presents the American War of Independence as essentially a land grab. Behind the rhetoric of republicanism and fiscal autonomy lay the desire to deal with the Native Americans without interference: George Washington is described archly as ‘the castigator of the Native ...”

“... era’ (which might have been better said of the splendid ocean liners of the day). In the highest class came the Bugatti Royale, a car for rajahs and emperors (though the last Habsburg emperor went into exile in a Gräf und Stift, the Austrian Rolls, the same model in which the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo). But the Bugatti that made the ...”

“... and 1818 the British authorities in Van Diemen’s Land engaged ‘in what amounted to a civil war’ with Howe and his bushrangers. When bounty-hunters killed him outside his bark hut in 1818 (decapitating the corpse, in accordance with the gruesome protocols of the day) he was dressed from head to foot in kangaroo skins. A contemporary tells us: In his ...”

“... The opening is subtitled ‘January 1981’, somewhere towards the end of Argentina’s Dirty War, so it’s reasonable to assume that the dangers hinted at are crimes of dictatorship, the same crimes that have been censored out of the newspaper Juan picks up that morning in a breakfast diner: ‘There were no articles about clandestine detention centres ...”

“... future that penetrates our present carries, rather, a sense of end-of-history exhaustion. The Cold War promise of apocalypse has been kicked away only to uncover rampant nationalism and what Robert Lowell called ‘small war on the heels of small war’. Our destiny seems to lurk in ...”

“... and Europe’s great expansion? Plagues are different from other catastrophes. Fire, flood and war destroy property as well as people. Famine makes people eat their seed corn and their animals. Plague does none of these things. If it halves the population then it doubles the amount of capital available per head. Or maybe more. In a rather Micawberish ...”

“... and trusted ‘acolyte’, he vehemently denies that a film they worked on during the Second World War, The Molander Case, was ever shot. Afterwards, the presenter is furious that ‘this ancient shithead’ with ‘half his marbles’ has been allowed on the show. But Wilzek, only half-aware of what a disaster it has been (‘I remember something without ...”

“... weapons of mass destruction. Benn did not believe the situation justified a military response. ‘War is easy to talk about,’ he said. There are not many people left of the generation which remembers it … I was in London during the Blitz in 1940, living [in Westminster] … Every night, I went to the shelter in Thames House. Every morning, I saw ...”

“... been hard-pushed to find readily useable material in them. As if the fact that Henry V depicts a war against de Gaulle’s compatriots rather than Hitler’s weren’t awkward enough, the script of Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film had to cut the king’s threats to allow his troops to rape and pillage at Harfleur, his orders for the killing of prisoners of ...”

“... acquaintances. Margaret Gardiner, who met Auden in the 1950s for the first time since before the war, was shocked at ‘his face … unimaginably creased and craggy’: ‘it took me some time to rediscover the young face I had known beneath this new mask. Then the two merged and after that I always saw him with a kind of double vision.’ Auden’s admirers ...”

“... yarn about a group of English officers and men in northern France near the end of the First World War; and it is narrated by one of them, a large working-class innocent called Humberstall, in peacetime a hairdresser. An alcoholic young lieutenant, Macklin, arrives in the battery and starts up a Jane Austen Society. Its ...”

“... I would be wise not to name’. He went on to serve his country as an officer in World War Two. ‘Who I am in my majority,’ he concludes, ‘and what I do, and whether I am in the criminal trades or not, and where and how I live, must remain my secret because I have a certain renown.’ It doesn’t ring true. Would someone who had gone through ...”

“... eclipse of her most acute modishness, and the closing of her house, just before the Second World War. Given how contemporary her style still seems, and how recently she was on the scene in person, with her glittering little face, round hats and soft suits, it is hard to believe that she was already 20 years old in 1903, and in her fifties during the ...”