“... 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 ...”

“... Netanyahu who preaches ‘strong’ national institutions, ‘traditional’ social forms and a war on ‘woke’. Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism is often held up as the ur-text of post-liberal thought. Yet many of national conservatism’s intellectual lodestars, such as the Ohio senator J.D. Vance (who appeared remotely in London, extolling the ...”

“... Abdel Nasser and was enthused by the Anglo-French-Israeli assault on Egypt in 1956. As the Cold War intensified, Adenauer determined that his country needed greater sovereignty and a greater role in Western economic and security alliances; Germany’s long road west lay through Israel. West Germany moved fast after 1960, becoming the most important supplier ...”

“... of the Royal Army Medical Corps, in which he re-enlisted two years after the end of the second war. A collection of poems by him had appeared in 1946, but The Military Orchid was his first published prose work. In the same year, 1949, Brooke brought out The Scapegoat and The Wonderful Summer, neither of which came my way at the time – nor were part of ...”

“... 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 ...”