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“... So Gaddafi is dead and Nato has fought a war in North Africa for the first time since the FLN defeated France in 1962. The Arab world’s one and only State of the Masses, the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya, has ended badly. In contrast to the bloodless coup of 1 September 1969 that overthrew King Idris and brought Gaddafi and his colleagues to power, the combined rebellion/civil war/ Nato bombing campaign to protect civilians has occasioned several thousand (5000? 10,000? 25,000?) deaths, many thousands of injured and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, as well as massive damage to infrastructure ...”

“... much less easy to see how those trapped in the situation could have taken those other ways out. War with Argentina is self-evidently a ludicrous way of making the simple point that a transfer of sovereignty ought to take place only with the consent of the Falklanders; thirteen months of hardship, picket-line battles, lost production and the huge expenses of ...”

“... of the Fianna Fail Party, Eamon de Valera and Sean Lemass, had fought in the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War. Their agenda was nationalist rather than social or economic. On St Patrick’s Day 1943 de Valera broadcast a version of his dream for Ireland: ‘a land whose countryside would be bright ...”

“... of the present social order, had considerable resonance in the year in which England went to war with revolutionary France. Godwin’s treatment was, all the same, relentlessly theoretical. His dislike of constraints upon the individual led him in principle towards anarchism, but in practice his gaze rarely dropped to contemplate the mob in the streets ...”

“... Daily Mail in 2014, after I had attacked him for claiming that Britain had fought the First World War for democracy, ‘but these arguments, like the interpretations of Oh! What a Lovely War! and Blackadder, are more reflective of the attitude of an undergraduate cynic playing to the gallery in a Cambridge Footlights revue ...”

“... like it’s 1999’, and in those days everyone quickly grasped what he meant. The Cold War made people edgy (‘Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?’) and it seemed quite possible that we might wake up one morning and find that we were ‘out of time’. But now? Well, ‘it’s here and I like it,’ as Will Smith says in his greeting card to ...”

“... and obsolete electrical equipment, and since the theatre was pointedly built on top of a German war cemetery the opportunity to set the most famous gravediggers in world drama to work in close proximity to some real graves was clearly too good to miss. About four hundred of us were led through dark passages and down rusting stairs into this shadowy modern ...”

“... made Julian the Apostate.’ The Last Pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate and the War against Christianity does not, despite its subtitle, collude with Gregory of Nazianzus in the making of ‘Julian the Apostate’. Rather, Hans Teitler follows the best recent scholarship to suggest that Christian narratives of Julian’s ‘...”

“... that the doll’s short skirt is more significant than the noose round her neck.) In a middle-class house I saw a poster depicting houris reclining on tiger skins, and wondered if the tiger on the acrylic blankets was a reference to the archetypal rug, long after the last Caspian tiger had been shot. That repetitive spartan interiors could be the result ...”

“... years, and which one way or another says as much about home and landscape, belonging and solitude, war and peace, history and memory, America and Europe, as that of any American storyteller in any medium. Ford made some terrible films, and many of his good films have terrible things in them, and as a man he was almost certainly terrible all the time, but ...”

“... born into an age that still thought speaking French was like playing the piano: something upper-class girls did. But French was also a space for her to dream in: the Bouviers were descended from French royalty, the story went (they were more likely shopkeepers in the Gard). In 1949, bored of Vassar’s rolled-up jeans, Bouvier applied for the Smith College ...”

“... characteristic sigh, as soon as the ancient form of government was taken away the entire political class ran headlong into servitude. It is essentially this Roman vision of libertas that Milton takes up in his major political tracts, and above all in The Tenure. At the climax of that work he finally asks whether the people of England have the right to put ...”

“... in the informal sector. Davis tells us they constitute ‘the fastest-growing . . . social class on earth’. In the neoliberal model they are ‘the heroic self-employed’, operating in a paradise of deregulation where initiative and entrepreneurialism will eventually triumph to the benefit of all. In practice, the growth of the informal sector has ...”

“... that would continue to absorb much of her time and energy until her death in 2007. The Vietnam War, nuclear proliferation, US actions in Central America, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and eventually the war in Iraq: she protested and organised against them all, and those fights marked her fiction. Her ...”

“... after Schulz’s birth the town went through a series of identity crises. During the First World War, Russian troops entered the town and destroyed it, burning down the family shop and home. Schulz managed to escape and ended up in Vienna, before returning home in August 1918. At that point, Drohobych was technically part of the West Ukrainian ...”