Search Results

“... According to one of its founders, George Wingate of the New York National Guard, ‘the Civil War had demonstrated with bloody clarity that soldiers who could not shoot straight were of little value. This situation, and the general ignorance concerning marksmanship which I found among our soldiers during the Civil ...”

“... past. The idea of the state of nature had been invoked by Hobbes to explain the anarchy of civil war and by Locke to justify land grabs in the Carolinas. But Geroulanos argues that for Rousseau this wasn’t so much a literary device as historical reality. Humanity had once existed blissfully in nature, ‘without industry, without speech, without ...”

“... took part in the celebrations in Genoa of the conquest of Ethiopia; and during the Second World War headed the high court of occupied Ljubljana after Italy’s annexation of Slovenia, where resistance was met with mass deportations, concentration camps, and police and military repression. The German judge on the court, Otto Riese, was so devoted a Nazi that ...”

“... or Tocqueville – who were immersed in the great conflicts of their time: religious strife, civil war, revolution, democracy. The first and most original was Machiavelli, confronting the crisis of Italy’s division at the turn of the 16th century. His novel idea of raison d’état became a central tradition in European political thought, and one formative ...”

“... of it we can hear the restrictive admonishments and stony silences of the upper-middle class in post-World War One France. She wrote that her mother’s situation ‘allowed her to close herself off in total distrust of anything that was not Family and in complete ignorance of anything that could be ...”

“... The surprise, and the relief it brought to those sections of the community most devastated by the war, were remarkable. But Rajiv Gandhi has signed accords before. The Punjab accord was pulled like a rabbit out of a turban with much the same wizardry less than three years ago, and the Punjab is now virtually in civil ...”

“... in particular, Lou and Ethel, whose special status stems from their memories of the Second World War. They were the first two characters established by the creators of the show, Tony Holland and Julia Smith (Ethel was based on a woman Holland met in a pub in Hackney). On Boxing Day 1988, seven million people watched ‘Civvy Street’, a prequel to the show ...”

“... had ridden out the Wall Street crash, and had been accumulating since before the First World War. The epithet ‘triumphant’ in the title of the new volume of John Richardson’s magnum opus has a brash, swaggering ring: fittingly so. This is the tale of an extremely rich and famous man who came pretty near to doing whatever he wanted. The Picasso of ...”

“... to take any financial or artistic credit. To earn a living in the years before the First World War, she felt she had no alternative but to go on the halls. As she could neither sing nor dance, she performed as a sex-object and subject of scandal – and not a particularly upmarket sex-object, either. Since Willy had enjoyed sexually humiliating her, no ...”

“... under heavy US-Israeli pressure to conclude a separate peace. By 1969, however, as a result of the war of attrition, the United States apparently changed its policy, and Nixon’s Secretary of State, William Rogers, assured Riad that America wanted a comprehensive settlement. The Rogers proposals were quickly rejected by Israel, and their author came under ...”

“... of 2024. Vladimir Putin is still the enemy, and shows no sign of losing; but more and more, the war itself, the instrument that was supposed to deliver Ukraine from Putin’s cruelty, is the enemy too. There is still reverence for the Ukrainian army, for its brave soldiers, as a noble ideal, but the perception has grown that the army is shackled to the ...”

“... in Vienna jumped from fewer than four thousand in 1848 to 175,000 on the eve of the First World War. It’s important not to underestimate the impact of small elites of the wealthy and educated – of the 405 Jewish families in early 19th-century Berlin, say. Pre-democratic liberal societies were constructed for the benefit of such groups. Thus the Italian ...”

“... For much of its history Labour has not been greatly interested in it. Even before the First World War Ramsay MacDonald dissented from almost all his socialist contemporaries on the Continent in rejecting proportional representation as leading to ‘academic and dogmatic politics’ and as a hindrance to ‘an expression of the public will’. Harold Laski’s ...”

“... few Jews among the labour movement’s earnest Christians’, but as an unquestioned upper-middle-class Jew, of neither Sephardic nor German origin, who was as reluctant as older Jewry to identify with what (speaking of the Zionist mathematician Selig Brodetsky, hero of poor immigrant boys in public libraries) he considered ‘the worst type of East End ...”

“... personal appearance, urbanity and arrogance, in part to a perceived discrepancy between his upper-class background and his radical politics (cf. Tony Benn), and in part to persistent accusations and rumours that he was soft on the Russians, if not a KGB mole. But, critics have asked, would a lone madman susceptible to violent anti-Palme feelings carry out the ...”