“... as female equality in recent times was prefigured on the popular screen before the end of World War Two. If she had followed up on some of the implications of this suggestion, she would have written an important book. Alas, she was talking too fast to hear herself think. Even so, Fast-Talking Dames could be the start of something big. If her judgment had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... later known as the Iron Guard, and Marshal Ion Antonescu, dictator during the Second World War, were responsible for the killing. Codreanu, strangled on royal orders in 1938, was the hugely influential prophet of a fanatical creed of blood, soil and Christian Orthodoxy; Antonescu was a willing collaborator in the Nazis’ Final Solution. From the ...”

“... 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 ...”