“... old Edouard Corbière, a popular novelist and ship-owner, Tristan occupied an odd niche in the class system of the day, a place set aside for the disreputable, unhygienic but harmlessly eccentric offspring of the energetic and successful. (Flaubert was another example.) Tristan was not merely a disappointment to his father, however. Paternal disapproval of ...”

“... inherited a state in crisis. When he came to the throne in 1640, 22 years into the Thirty Years’ War, much of his land was under Swedish occupation; the people in his capital, Berlin, were starving; and many of the city’s buildings had been burned down. He needed an army but this was difficult in a state made up of a patchwork of territories scattered ...”

“... the Palestinian Authority, which looks even more impotent than usual. Hamas’s performance in the war has not only raised its prestige among Palestinians; it has made them forget for the moment its mismanagement and authoritarian rule inside Gaza. If the PA held an election, Hamas would almost certainly win, which may be the real reason that, in late ...”

“... is also much in fashion in universities, and most of Ireland ticks that box too. The war which recently afflicted the six counties still under British rule (the ‘sick counties’, Flann O’Brien called them) also brought the world’s attention to bear on the island as a whole. Devastated in the 19th century by a famine in which British ...”

“... condemn the Refuseniks. Courage to Refuse, the movement of combat soldiers who have declared ‘war on the war’ and refuse to continue serving in the Occupied Territories, was shocked to discover that Meretz wanted nothing to do with it. Israel is in a state of ideological stasis; the Left has capitulated and the last ...”

“... in contrast, treats a subject of wide historical significance: the value system of the dominant class of a past age. The ideal of chivalry as Charny and his contemporaries knew it is a concept that the modern mind relates to only uneasily. The word has become invested with too many overtones of attitudes that we tend to be pleased with ourselves for having ...”

“... off and throwing away what they call the keys of hell. The Czech legion, at the start of the war sent to fight for the Austrians against the Russians, are now nominally fighting for the Social Revolutionaries against the Bolsheviks, but mainly are longing to go home. In the novel and in history a handful of them did, leaving Vladivostok (in history) in ...”

“... known for putting politics back into painting, landscape and poetry, shows himself to be a first-class historian. The archival sources and range of contemporary printed sources on which he bases his study are impressive. In addition, his training as a literary scholar serves him well as a reader of legal texts. Barristers and judges claimed that legal ...”

“... deprecatingly, as the slightly above average product of a lycée-trained, French upper-middle-class background ‘that might have been used to illustrate the theses of Pierre Bourdieu’. Despite this insightful modesty, he assumes his readers share precisely this background and its code of sentiments, including its delicate political conservatism and ...”

“... a result of white encroachments on aboriginal hunting grounds, culminating in a full-scale Black War in the late 1820s – Tasmanians against colonial troops and armed settlers. That wasn’t the only massacre. Some of the European combatants were vicious, and clearly meant to exterminate the natives, not just defeat them – Lawson provides some gory ...”

“... had been in the habit of telling Hitler what Hitler didn’t want to hear, specifically that the war on the Eastern Front was unwinnable. A dictator’s Weltanschauung is necessarily not that of even his grandest minions; it is not an empirical construct susceptible to challenge or correction. Todt died when his apparently sabotaged plane crashed on take-off ...”

“... The dominant early scholarship held to the view that the underlying forces behind the post-war integration of Western Europe should be sought in the growth of objective – not only economic, but also social and cultural – interdependencies between the states that made up the initial Coal and Steel Community and its sequels. The tenor of this first ...”

“... herself only the occasional dry aside. The Fieldings are also prime candidates for the kind of class condescension that inspired many humorists between the wars. Les is a tradesman with a cigarette tucked behind his ear; Alma, with her ‘Betty Lou’ velour powder puff and glamorous ‘Tattoo’ lipstick, fears being thought ‘common’. She gave up ...”

“... At 13 or 14 my father got a job in a billiard hall, and thereby became a useful player. When war broke out in August 1914, he volunteered, while still 17. His regiment was the Royal Artillery. He was in France and Flanders for four years, and was then invalided out suffering from trench feet.Enlisting in the Army may have had a special significance for ...”

“... horizons (‘Tuesday, April 6th. The nation has been told that Britain and Argentina are not at war, we are at conflict ... I am reading Scoop by a woman called Evelyn Waugh’). There are steps forward, too, into adult experience. He runs away from home, getting as far as Manchester, although his disappearance seems to cause no stir – nothing about him ...”