“... Cameroon, where Mbembe was born, remained a German protectorate until the end of the First World War. Eugenics research programmes in African colonies formed the basis for Nazi race science (skulls from Namibia and Tanzania ended up in the collection of German museums and universities).Mbembe’s historicisation of the Holocaust drew unwanted attention to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... plotting (he tried to get accepted to do an anthropology postgraduate degree at Chicago after the war on the subject of universal story patterns). Rhetorically, Vonnegut’s fictional technique consists of simple assertions about the important elements and actions in whatever world he happens to be describing. The other kind of procedure, in which these ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... interpreting and enhancing daily life, the nation was rocked by rebellions and plunged into civil war for the sake of religion; a king was beheaded and a royal dynasty replaced. Even when the ideological and political monopoly of the state church weakened towards the end of the period, religion remained powerful enough to trigger waves of life-transforming ...”

“... earlier the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated. The world was gearing up for the Great War, but Blast was evidence that a major campaign was already underway, and it advertised its confrontational style with a puce-and-black colour scheme and parallel columns of hates and loves, ‘blasted’ and ‘blessed’. The bombastic birth of Vorticism ...”

“... for me came when David Miliband claimed that they’d been ‘punished enough’ for the Iraq War: ‘Well, you haven’t actually been voted out of office,’ I growled.) The gloom quickly gave way to a sense of the advantages. For a start the voters might have fallen a little out of love with the idea of electoral reform. Proportional representation is ...”

“... should not have made. Second example: disability. An amputee dedicates himself to becoming a world-class athlete and competes successfully in the Paralympics. Or a person born deaf finds the meaning of his life through immersion in the kinds of communication available only to people who lack the ability to hear. The way these people value their lives seems to ...”

“... frenzy of capital accumulation, mass production, shiny new technology, depression, hunger and class struggle. By the 1960s, though, a new politics had coalesced around the Vietnam War. The Oppens invested their hopes in a younger generation: radical activists, poets, musicians, hippies, anarchists and students who came ...”