“... of Germany during trials of various amphetamines, but never marketed. In the Second World War various applications for MDMA were tested by the American Forces, which had evidence that it could fend off exhaustion and act as an appetite suppressant, as well as being a truth drug useful in interrogation. MDMA was rediscovered and studied by Alexander ...”

“... unruly relationships’), Essay Recitation (followed by a 20-minute question and answer period), War of the Words (Coleridge/Wordsworth face-offs), Sixty Minutes of an Impressive Novel (selections included The Great Gatsby [Fitzgerald, 1925] and The Sound and the Fury [Faulkner, 1929]), and the Van Meer Radio Theatre Hour, featuring such plays as Mrs ...”

“... in the 1930s; and the first antibiotics became widely available at the end of the Second World War. All these modern drugs were introduced to treat diseases that were well defined and known to be caused by particular organisms. When the Spaniards used cinchona bark to treat fevers in 17th-century Peru, no one knew what caused the diseases that were being ...”

“... and the politicians, too) are beset by powerful temptations. Spitzer must have known that high-class prostitution is very tempting to men who can afford it. Maybe that was one of the reasons he was zealous in prosecuting it. The fact that he succumbed to the temptation himself doesn’t undermine that position; if anything it reinforces it. It’s like an ...”

“... against it – begins with Teddy and Yvette’s wedding in Santa Barbara during the Second World War, and ends with Yvette’s funeral at the turn of the millennium. A narrative spanning nearly 60 years and more than 8000 miles (the distance from Rome to Hawaii), with half a dozen major characters whose various points of view are given more or less equal ...”

“... to wind up the Raj, ending the rule of the king-emperor Brigadier Powell had pledged during the war to maintain. He was working in the Conservative Research Department at the time, alongside more worldly, easy-going political aspirants, who mocked his atavistic convictions. It was one thing to oppose the Labour government when it introduced the British ...”

“... continued to have an expansive conception of the imagined nation, at least until the outbreak of war. Barely more than 1 per cent of the Jews who left the Pale of Settlement went to Palestine. Yet the Zionist narrative, whether articulated by Herzl or the popular novelist, playwright and chronicler of the ghetto Israel Zangwill, who took part in public ...”

“... defense secretary Rubenstein holds sway) is in charge, where disabled veterans of the Venezuelan War, cut off from their benefits, live in LNWI (that’s ‘Low Net Worth Individual’) shantytowns that are just a hair’s breadth from open rebellion. Tanks patrol the airports, bearing signs that read ‘BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF ...”

“... battered Indonesia’s economy and released the cork that had kept contained religious, ethnic, class and other divisions in this very diverse archipelago. The result was political and social meltdown. The economy, already in a worse state than, say, South Korea’s, shrank by 13 per cent in 1998, and tens of millions of Indonesians fell below the poverty ...”

“... of Negroes’. Nella meanwhile was working as a librarian in Harlem. During the First World War, she took a job as a nurse in the Bronx, an occupation she returned to in the later part of her life. The idea that she wished to get above herself, by playing up her European heritage at the expense of the West Indian, nevertheless took hold. Hutchinson ...”

“... evidence, he argues that Cosa Nostra, having regained its strength after the Second World War, laundered drug money from the mid-1970s through a small bank in Milan, Banca Rasini, where Berlusconi’s father had worked all his life and which lent substantial sums to Silvio’s real estate business. Despite the best efforts of prosecutors, it has ...”

“... in fact, died ‘for King and Country’ and many thoughtful people in the decade after the Great War believed that their sacrifice brought patriotism into disrepute. Carter’s book makes an imaginative effort to reconstruct what Blunt would have felt in the 1930s. No doubt he was moved by the hunger marches, certainly he was stirred by the death of John ...”

“... taunt the oddballs in their midst; other targets were orphans (Ya ya ya, your father died in the war!) and Jews. My father was not in fact a Communist, he was an independent, a maverick who ran the Australian Council for Civil Liberties as a front organisation for himself, I thought, though others said for the Communists. It might have been easier for us if ...”

“... who left school at 13. His brief apprenticeship as a carpenter was cut short by the outbreak of war. He tried his hand at most jobs in the building trade, and at worst had to dig roads: ‘a jack of all trades’, he always says, ‘master of none’. Now 81, he has spent the last two years in and out of hospital with multiple myeloma, a cancer which ...”

“... And the young Auden did seem to fancy himself as qualified to lay down the law to an awed class. When compelled into it he disliked the life of the schoolmaster, but it took him some time to rid himself of such fancies, and the stern expository manner that went with them. The seriousness of whatever law he was laying down would sometimes call for ...”