“... After numerous moves back and forth across the country, they finally settled in working-class Philadelphia.The original comic-book nut in the family wasn’t Robert but Charles Jr, who, though he never got beyond pencil and crayon, infected his siblings with his mania. Comic-book lovers of Crumb’s generation are often nostalgic for the EC horror ...”

“... fighting. For the British it was, militarily and symbolically, one of the worst disasters of the war. It proved to be an intensely personal disaster for the more than eighty thousand Allied personnel who were captured that day. Worst of all was life in the makeshift camps set up in the jungle for those sent to work on the construction of the railway line ...”

“... little more than a common ideology – and by the sense of shared grievances that the West’s ‘war on terror’ was likely to foster among Muslims. The concept of ‘leaderless jihad’, now much in vogue among so-called terrorism experts, is to a great extent al-Suri’s invention. Considering his belief in leaderless jihad, it’s remarkable that al-Suri ...”

“... soldiers welcomes us like greeters at a conference. We fill in forms for accreditation to the war. Halfway down the forms ask: Do you need anthrax? Do you need smallpox? We answer no. I had the first anthrax injection in London last week. Paul hasn’t been vaccinated for either. You’re supposed to have three anthrax injections to be protected. We catch ...”

“... Sisi put Washington’s rhetoric to good use, assuring the president that Egypt is ‘fighting a war against terrorism … The Egyptian army is undertaking major operations in the Sinai so it is not transformed into a base for terrorism that will threaten its neighbours and make Egypt unstable. If Egypt is unstable then the entire region is ...”

“... in the grand manner of the Rocky Mountain Sublime. Social satire and protest began to matter: class and race became visible – i.e. permissible – in painting; the past was reinvented and put beside representative objects of the present day. In the course of the 1930s, the nation’s painters showed the streets of Harlem and the factories of Henry ...”

“... family. To regard the wife working for material gain as an anomaly is to accept Victorian middle-class ideals, and to assume, as indeed did many Victorian commentators, that these extended over the whole population, and that they had been the norm in past times. Caroline Davidson’s grasp of the historic family economy is weak: this is shown by her remark ...”

“... in the east Slav world for two viral YouTube moments. One shows him paying his respects to the war dead in a high wind when, at the exact moment of his solemn bow, a large wreath, mounted on a stand, falls forward and hits him on the head. The other is an exchange at a televised press conference in December. When a journalist, Mustafa Nayem, asked about ...”

“... on the important matters being discussed, but the poem ends:Maybe what they say is trueOf war and war’s alarms;But O that I were young againAnd held her in my arms.Thomas Mann comes into all this because, in a lightly sardonic spirit, Yeats took as the epigraph to his poem a phrase from Mann which MacLeish had ...”

“... life, and in ours. Pandemics, for example, the Trump presidency, #MeToo, exit from Afghanistan and war in Ukraine; and for Batuman personally, as she put it in a recent interview, those five years chart the process of coming to terms with her queer identity in her late thirties. Selin isn’t into history, but history happens anyway, and the challenge for ...”

“... settling in Highgate. Gellner’s parents were representative of that stratum of educated, middle-class Jews who, profoundly grateful to Britain for providing them with a home, nonetheless continued throughout the war to speak to each other in the language of the now hated enemy. Ernest finished his schooling at St ...”

“... detail of local power and society. Things are not much better when organisations rely on middle-class or English-speaking Iraqis for information. It is not only Ahmed Chalabi who proved to have little idea about the situation in Iraq. Saddam’s regime worked hard to fragment and isolate the population. Religious sheikhs in Karbala do not know how to assess ...”

“... political vocabulary. The Iranian Mujahiddin (leftist supporters of Bani Sadr currently waging war upon the Ayatollahs) are described as munafiqin in the official government media. It is a part of this fragmented and turbulent world of political Islam that V.S. Naipaul sets out to investigate in his latest book. His travels take him to ...”

“... to do. Then fashions changed, the ‘great women’ were left behind, and the search for working-class heroines began. All our attention is claimed by Claire Lacombe and Pauline Léon, of the Revolutionary Republican Women. Is this shift helpful, or productive of real knowledge? Godineau dares to wonder. Certainly, it tells us more about our own concerns ...”

“... movie career of Ronald Reagan, his analysis of The Birth of a Nation and his meditations on Cold War anti-Communist movies are characterised by their lucidity, invention and historical depth. He locates the origins of The Jazz Singer a century before the movie’s release, in the age of Andrew Jackson. As the frontiersmen Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo ...”