“... in a Sunni Muslim rural area of North Lebanon during the early Seventies, before the recent civil war. This beautifully written book describes the culture of masculinity in its multiple refractions through violence and narrative, joking and play, a world where status and power are organised vertically, where big landowners use the small landowners as their ...”

“... it is possible to do, freed from readership’. ‘I come from the thing called the “working class”,’ he says, ‘and I didn’t go to one of the older universities, and I’ve never lived in London. I’m a provincial … Which is everywhere but London, Oxford and Cambridge, and one or two rather well-to-do spots around that way. It doesn’t mean ...”

“... unsuccessful defence against an invasion by the forces of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, in the War of the Triple Alliance, which was fomented and encouraged by the British, who needed a new source of cotton because of the American Civil War and also wanted to get rid of Paraguay’s protectionist regime. My own ...”

“... the decline of the Liberal Party, the dominant progressive political force until the First World War, which had slipped behind Labour in the 1922 election. The other big change was the postwar extension of the franchise, which nearly trebled the size of the electorate. Even taking these shifts into account, it remains staggering that a party founded in 1900 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”