“... poverty and brutality that underpinned it. His writings were republished at the height of the Cold War by Moscow’s Foreign Languages Press: the cover features a cop with a truncheon beneath an intimidating canyon of skyscrapers.But all this is a sideshow to the main event: Cohen’s account of the ways in which the Soviet Union modelled itself after a ...”

“... time, Edwin Montagu, passionately opposed the declaration and detested Zionism. After the Great War, the British saddled themselves with responsibility for Mandatory Palestine, which proved one of the unhappier episodes in the decline and fall of the British Empire. In 1922, when Churchill was colonial secretary for a short but eventful spell, he unified ...”

“... stopped reading the teleprompter to ‘speak from the heart’: ‘To the next generation, your war is here, you don’t have to go searching for it. Your people are afraid … Who among you will love something more than you love yourself? Who among you are going to step up and take the fight to the enemy, because it’s here? The only way we survive this ...”

“... passion.Kracauer and Adorno were introduced by a mutual friend towards the end of the First World War and soon began spending Saturday afternoons together reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Perhaps theirs isn’t the only romance to have blossomed over the transcendental deduction of the categories of understanding. ‘I am not exaggerating when I say ...”

“... medal for advancing under fire after having his arm shattered by a bullet. In the First World War he won another medal for his efforts ‘to re-establish order in the troops’ – a euphemism, probably, for shooting his own men. He may or may not have participated in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s freebooting occupation of Fiume in 1919, in which the poet and ...”

“... Stewart, and he worked hard at every detail. He was a canny businessman. Before the Second World War, he invested in a small airline. Soon after the war, taking advantage of the new freedom from studio contracts, he was one of the first actors to arrange to be paid a percentage of the profits on individual pictures. His ...”

“... it and Israel. Arafat categorically turned the offer down, as he did similar offers. Then the Gulf War occurred, and because of the disastrous positions it took then, the PLO lost even more ground. The gains of the intifada were squandered, and today advocates of the new document say: ‘We had no alternative.’ The correct way of phrasing that is: ‘We had ...”

“... medically exigent category, PTSD didn’t exist before the late 19th century. The American Civil War is the first war for which there exist relatively abundant medical records that allow retroactive diagnosis of symptoms close to our modern concept of trauma as an interior wound. Anxious to find a precise pathophysiology ...”

“... his early thirties, he had served in the Armed Forces during Italy’s participation in the Great War. Wounded once and decorated repeatedly, he had been promoted to lieutenant and then captain. At the war’s end he had married and started a family. By 1923, when Pound met him, he was managing the Palace Hotel, located ...”

“... philosopher Harry Marquis. Marquis is a socialist of the old school. A fighter pilot in World War Two, his distinguishing physical feature is a ‘dissident’ thatch of prematurely white hair. A brilliant rhetorician and provocateur of student action, Marquis is a maverick politically, having left the Party in 1956. The founder of Thought and Action, he ...”

“... looks as if the Malorys, father and son, had strong nerves if not reliable loyalties; in a civil war those who will commit themselves to violent action without temporising are especially valuable. Especially, of course, if they are good at it, as Malory’s jailbreak from Colchester would indicate. Field believes that Sir Thomas was released from Lancastrian ...”

“... the 20th century. Her first novel, however, the beautiful Return of the Soldier (1918), seemed to class her as what was then called a ‘psychopathological writer’ – with her older friend May Sinclair, who had organised London’s first medico-psychological clinic. The Return is the case-history of an officer invalided home from the trenches. He is an ...”

“... in the Jorvik Viking Museum at York, or by voluntary groups like the Sealed Knot, who enact Civil War battles; the preservation of the built and natural ‘heritage’; the interest in old photographs; and costume drama on stage and screen. On all these subjects Samuel has a torrent of vivid detail and penetrating, if not always well co-ordinated ...”

“... if vaguely with the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the ever emerging middle class, male dress has been relatively sober and static for two hundred years. What happened in the 20th century, Judith Watt suggests in her introduction to Fashion Writing, was that the whole subject of clothes came to be seen as feminine or effeminate. Hence ...”

“... from Sir John Clapham and Max Weber to the theory of mental states, the study of working-class culture, anthropology, demography, political sociology and social psychology, urban history, the study of the family, and the history of science and technology. Would Kenyon’s irritation with Butterfield be quite so pronounced if he had remembered to ...”