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“... question. Philip K. Dick, indeed, posited a future world in which the Axis powers had won World War Two, and proceeded to divide the United States down the middle into two zones with two decidedly different regimes of military occupation. In Fire on the Mountain Terry Bissell posits a world in which a successful John Brown’s raid sets off a black ...”

“... and a great many others call a genocide should more properly be described as a First World War event involving mass killings (one of many such, down to the present day) and deportations (a wartime necessity given Armenian complicity in Russia’s invasion of North-east Anatolia); but in any case it was an unfortunate event that happened a long time ...”

“... A few months alter the fall of Margaret Thatcher, the most original thinker of post-war Conservatism died. Perhaps partly because of the commotion caused by the change of national leadership, the passing of Michael Oakeshott did not attract much public notice. Even the Spectator, which might have been expected to mark the event with a full salute, ignored it for half a year, before carrying a curiously distracted piece by its editor, reporting strange losses in the philosopher’s papers, without so much as mentioning his political ideas ...”

“... of world wars. The nightmarish weaponry of a technological age was grotesquely foreshadowed in The War of the Worlds, which had been published two years earlier; in another story of the near future, When the Sleeper Wakes, he had invented the fighter pilot as hero. The Time Machine, with its visionary glimpses of a degenerate far future, contained graphic ...”

“... optimism of Victorian times had disappeared, and the Army’s dismal performances in the Boer War seemed to many to symbolise an incipient national breakdown. A popular pamphlet in 1905 proclaimed ‘The Decline and Fall of the British Empire’, and ideas for reversing the decline ranged from the purely environmental (such as Baden-Powell’s creation of ...”

“... his thirst for brandy and, as Lytton Strachey maliciously asserted, transformed ‘the middle-class legal Don’ into ‘a viveur, who carried a lot of liquor and was lecherous with the ladies’. A better stepmother than anyone could have anticipated, Margot gave birth to two children and endured three unsuccessful pregnancies. After the third, ‘she ...”

“... Most of our younger cousins, nieces and nephews who have grown up in ten years of unremitting war tend to speak interchangeably of computer games, football scores and massacres, and their easy way of pointing out differences between Grads, RPGs and Katyushas is chilling: nevertheless their parents persist in giving them ...”

“... a Benedictine convent in London, at 92. This after forty years as a nun, converted just after the war, when she is transformed from middle-aged, middle-class mummy to Mother Mary Anselm, leaving her two grown-up daughters strangely orphaned in the rejected ‘world’. (Daddy dies – in a parenthesis, again, daddy est mort ...”

“... of State John Foster Dulles, who had been discovered to have cancer during the week of the Suez war. Towards the end of the conversation, Dulles suddenly asked ‘Selwyn, why did you stop? Why didn’t you go through with it and get Nasser down?’ The British visitors fell apart with astonishment. ‘If you had so much as winked at us ...’ Lloyd ...”

“... in spite of Suez and other setbacks for Britain on the periphery (the 1958 coup in Iraq, the civil war in Yemen in the 1960s), British influence in fact increased in the core Gulf states over the next 15 years, with successful palace coups backed by the British government in Saudi Arabia in 1964 and Sharjah, one of the Trucial States, in 1965. Qatar, the ...”

“... Hecht, who teaches political ecology at UCLA, has spent her career examining the war waged on ‘untamed nature’ by ‘civilisation’, and arguing that – contrary to what the warriors think – what we call nature and what we call society are fundamentally the same thing. She continues the argument in her new book, The Scramble for the ...”

“... was inevitable. These were heady days for American and British officials and enthusiasm for the ‘war on terror’ was soaring. At our first meeting, Manning’s Downing Street successor, Nigel Sheinwald, told me angrily that security in Palestine could be achieved by eradicating the ‘virus’ of Hamas from Gaza, and eliminating its ‘disease’ from the ...”

“... doctrine that ‘goodness’ and ‘beauty’ are supernatural entities accessible only to first-class minds, and Russell was trying to do something similar for logic, maintaining that anyone clever enough to understand it gains access to a realm of intellectual perfection beyond the hurly-burly of earthly existence. Wittgenstein’s scepticism about logical ...”

“... Charles Manson. Those could be seen as political – one of the motivations was to provoke a race war – but the horrifying character of Manson and the celebrity of some of the victims were what caught most people’s attention. The fascination with the episode has left the sense of 1960s LA as an apolitical place largely undisturbed.With Set the Night on ...”

“... most intractable problems in American history. How should the nation be reunited after the Civil War? Who is entitled to American citizenship and the right to vote? What should be the status of the four million emancipated slaves? As Brenda Wineapple shows in The Impeachers, Johnson’s problem was his failure to rise to the challenge of Reconstruction after ...”