“... the governor of the bank, admitted that inflation in the UK – triggered by a combination of war in Ukraine and supply-chain bottlenecks in the wake of Covid lockdowns – is likely to endure for longer than in the United States or mainland Europe.At the end of June, data emerged from the European Commission which appeared to confirm the worst fears ...”

“... It was to be compared to Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, as belonging to ‘a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits us to a world of its own’. The ‘fortunate child’ who was given The Hobbit would have no notion of ‘the deep sources in our blood and tradition’ from which the ‘inhabitants’ of ...”

“... more than five years after Gaddafi’s fall in October 2011, Libya has been relegated to that class of countries (Afghanistan, Somalia) from which we hear occasional news of US drone strikes but little else. Gaddafi’s overthrow was quickly followed by a national implosion. The historical divide between Tripolitania in the west and the cities of ...”

“... South Africa, a dominion of the British Empire, occupied South-West Africa during the First World War: affinities between European colonial nations trumped wartime animosity. Europeans farmed the fertile areas, while the Indigenous peoples were confined to Bantustans in areas affected by drought. This structure of land ownership remained in place after ...”

“... is a fair surmise that warriors and would-be warriors, these days more often college-educated, are war-book buyers, of which the Iliad is the echt and ur. Some of course – nasty fellows – would widen the explanation by seeing Americans as a whole as war-lovers, hence war-book ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cost. During the late Sixties, his short stories and novels addressed the aftermath of the 1967 war, sympathetically in the case of an emergent Palestinian resistance, critically in the case of the Egyptian military intervention in Yemen. Mahfouz was the most celebrated writer and cultural figure to greet the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979, and ...”

“... of the present. By contrast, the ancient peoples of Australia possessed no capacity for war and were denied the capacity to make treaties; the land they occupied was defined in law as terra nullius and, even after the recent judgment reversing that rule, they must found their claims in the law of nature, rather than of nations (or history). This ...”

“... of men whose comradeship had been forged by the Long March, by Japanese aggression and by civil war. They had made a revolution and then boldly undertaken to remake a society of 600 million people. Their instrument of rule and regeneration was arguably the world’s most efficient and dynamic Communist Party. Within months, this image of peace and harmony ...”

“... of the family over Ludwig’s determination, immediately upon his return home at the end of World War One, to rid himself unconditionally of his whole fortune; and of her own dismay at his decision to become a country schoolteacher. She protested to him that his teaching in an elementary school would be like ‘using a precision instrument to open ...”

“... L’Age d’Or (1930), strains of Tristan accompany the very public copulation of a middle-class couple, delighting in having murdered their children. It is not always easy to gauge the sincerity, or specificity, of Wagnerian allusions, but the delicious Wagnerian puns and echoes in Finnegans Wake – Tristy (Tristan), Isolade (Isolde), ‘mudheeldy ...”

“... book in which T.E. Lawrence described his campaign in the Arabian desert during the First World War as an attempt to give the Arabs the foundations on which to build ‘the dream palace of their national thoughts’. Lawrence, however, dwelt only on the fringe of modern Arab history, and the task that Ajami has set himself is to tell that history from the ...”

“... unpleasant deaths, or maybe it was just another sea story told to new guys. Katchke was a high-class tech who knew about radar and advanced electronics; he even did some soldering now and then. I belonged to a lower caste: I swapped black boxes, ran testing protocols and checked the tyre pressure on the weapon carriers and wheeled them around on the ...”

“... town: grown men in tubs like cocoons, like giant turds; the ferocious previews of the First World War as international guests squabble round the tables in the hotel restaurants. ‘From the recesses of his stomach, as though from a box, he hears again a child’s or woman’s scream.’ Hold on tight, please, to that scream. Before the spa-town episode, we ...”

“... had been ruled by half a dozen armed gangs who took what, and whom, they wanted. Fifteen years of war had destroyed the economy and the infrastructure, armed the population with modern weapons, brutalised tens of thousands and displaced millions. For the people of Kandahar the woman’s abduction and gang-rape were nothing out of the way. But the reaction ...”