“... 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 ...”

“... engine: the Rolls-Royce Merlin, famous for having powered most Spitfires during the Second World War. I don’t know what every part does, but there is pleasure in trying to parse a sentence in a foreign language. The Merlin is now downstairs, labelled as ‘the engine which saved Britain’, close by Miss England, a contender for the water speed record, in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Women’s Commission of the Human Rights League of Chad, are advocates on behalf of women in war-torn nations, or nations which have only recently emerged from conflict. The argument that is held to justify the existence of these groups is that women have been so completely marginalised, and their problems are so specific, that they require special ...”

“... the Era of Foot, the Labour Party remains what it always was: a coalition of trade unions, working-class institutions and middle-class intellectuals (or men and women who have become middle-class by rising up). During the Labour leadership crisis, the political correspondents in the press ...”

“... killing, notably the Turkish elimination of more than a million Armenians during the First World War. Three million or more Ukrainians were deliberately starved during the man-made famine that accompanied Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture in the early 1930s. The expulsion of 12 million ethnic Germans from East-Central Europe at the end of the ...”