“... increase in human misery? Yes. An increase that will be seen as unacceptable? Not necessarily. The class, race and nationality which have produced some of the greatest racing drivers, from Juan Fangio on, and remarkably daring pilots during their first-ever modern war, are not simply going to accept defeat in one ...”

“... Before my appointment to a visiting scholarship at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was confirmed I had to submit a synopsis of my proposed research. At that time my working title was ‘Physical Appearance and Life Chances in Modern Society’. Already before my departure in late October I had changed the latter phrase to ‘Life Experiences’, having worked out that while the good-looking arouse different responses from those encountered by the less well-favoured and thus have different opportunities and experiences, one cannot say that they are inevitably more successful ...”

“... Eighty years​ have gone by. But there’s still no agreement on how the Spanish Civil War should be remembered. Nor should there be. The real tribute to the force of that human firestorm is the contest of judgments and feelings which still smoulders and still causes pain. Where should the focus be? For many, simply on the stories: the recounting of sacrificial courage and suffering ...”

“... efforts of revisionist academics to exorcise it. His preoccupations were those of his time and class and gender, but their effects linger, and shape popular understandings of the past. National development. The dominant theme of the received orthodoxy is the coming into being of a mature and autonomous nation. Open almost any of the narrative accounts ...”

“... Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of A Perfect Spy, I’ve occasionally wondered what Roth’s generous blurb says about the postwar English novel. As a le Carré bore, however, I’ve also wondered how Roth managed to overlook Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), the ...”

“... 56 per cent majority, the first woman to win the presidency. Initially better received by a middle class that detested Lula, for two years she enjoyed quite widespread esteem for a show of calm and competence. But her inheritance was less rosy than it seemed. High commodity prices had underlain Lula’s boom, without altering Brazil’s historically low rates ...”

“... for ‘individual freedom’. Observers outside Tennessee may find it incongruous to identify a war fought to preserve slavery with the ideal of freedom, but Jefferson Cowie, who teaches history at Vanderbilt University, in the heart of the state, wouldn’t be surprised. His new book seeks to explain why so many Americans, especially but not exclusively in ...”

“... Three decades ago​, with the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the South American dictatorships, many hoped that the much talked about ‘peace dividend’ promised by Bush senior and Thatcher would actually materialise. No such luck. Instead, we have experienced continuous wars, upheavals, intolerance and fundamentalisms of every sort – religious, ethnic and imperial ...”

“... was itself an imitation of European models and was in turn imitated – especially after the Civil War, when its remodelled big dome emerged as a symbol of the Union – by more than a few state capitols from California to Wisconsin, Utah to Mississippi. The very name ‘Capitol’, together with the Capitol Hill on which the building stands is an invocation ...”

“... during the 1850s as an open adversary of Southern ‘Slave Power’ and the advent of the Civil War in 1861 shattered this second party system, and ushered in the seemingly familiar conflict of Democrats and Republicans. In the 1890s, tensions between agrarian and industrial interests enshrined a new set of meanings in these two broad political ...”

“... until June 1928, when he was found guilty of ‘conspiratorial activity, instigation of civil war, justification of crime and incitement to class hatred’ and sentenced to 20 years, four months and five days. In prison Gramsci’s life was very different from that of the activist who ‘could have been killed a dozen ...”

“... of the principal celebrants in 1938. ‘Pioneering had become a cult among the cliques, it had class nowadays. The pure merinos, now sophisticated, were using their past – properly censored, of course – to propel their present and their future. They had risen above themselves.’ But, as the plot goes on to satirise, they remained upstarts, and were ...”

“... it; and because it was counter-productive, since foreign espionage was often claimed as a cause of war, and domestic surveillance was considered intrinsically damaging to the trust people needed to have in their governments, and in each other, if they were to be content and thus politically stable. To a great extent this attitude persisted into the early 20th ...”

“... the answer is that anybody would like to do it if it was so easy. During the Second World War, when I was employed in propaganda, there were a number of rosy schemes we occasionally put out on the radio, to the effect that after the Allies had won the war, when everything would be much better, there would be schemes ...”

“... the pinnacle of his career, after his great victories with the Third Army in the Franco-Prussian War, Crown Prince Frederick William had continued to reject Bismarck’s policies. On 31 December 1870, when the war council determined to break the siege of Paris by bombarding the city, a move the crown prince strenuously ...”