“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an episode made famous by Ryszard Kapuściński’s more-magic-than-realist masterpiece The Soccer War (1978). Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’, Wilson insists, determines English feelings about Argentina at least as much as the Falklands War. Progress all the way to the semi-finals in 1998 vindicated the new Croatia’s ...”

“... of the Abyssinians sank before the resources of our warlike science.’ The decisive battle of the war – the Battle of Arogi – lasted for an hour and a half, at the end of which the British forces had suffered 29 casualties. Of the Abyssinian force of three thousand at least five hundred were killed; many more were wounded. So the nay-sayers and ...”

“... talking into two microphones that had been taped together. He was telling his men why the war against Iraq was a sacred war, and that if they were killed they would go to paradise. I was drawn to the fragility of Hossein’s features, to his delicate nose and lips. His hair was receding prematurely, but you could ...”

“... to pack my things several times, but in the end we left with our hands almost empty.Before the war, I was a writer. Today, on the ninth day, I feel unable to string two words together. It’s hard to believe that just over a week ago we were living a normal life. I have to try very hard to remember what that life was like.Those who survive will be able to ...”

“... Group predicts that more than half the country’s 242 million people will qualify as middle class by 2020), though recent economic setbacks suggest, as with similar predictions about India, that this may prove to be fantasy. Wealth has brought disconcerting changes: large parts of Sumatra, ravaged by slash-and-burn investors, resemble a lunar ...”

“... Kapuściński, Mailer and Naipaul. Congo is endlessly fertile literary terrain. Seven years of war there – in a country the size of Western Europe with a population of almost seventy million – occupied fewer column inches in the Western press than seven weeks of war in the Gaza Strip, yet nowhere in Africa has ...”