“... by the French army in the Low Countries in 1794, and Napoleon – alert to the potential of air war – set up a Compagnie d’Aérostiers. During the invasion panic of 1803, Uglow notes, a new play, Goody Two Shoes; or Harlequin Alabaster, was performed at Sadler’s Wells; in it a French invasion by balloon is foiled at a lighthouse, in the process ...”

“... Six weeks​ after President George W. Bush launched what the White House called a Global War on Terror, in October 2001, the journalist Bob Woodward asked the vice president, Dick Cheney, when the war would end. ‘Not in our lifetime,’ Cheney said. One can picture his barely suppressed smirk, a facial tic familiar from interviews ...”

“... among the livid faces of the dead.’ Rivers’s attempts to help his patients deal with war neurosis are essentially humane and uncoercive, and as such contrast with those of Dr Yealland, another historical figure working in the same field. The episode where Rivers watches his colleague torture a dumb soldier back to speech by giving him repeated ...”

“... According to those who employ this smooth and evasive construction, the lesson of the Vietnam War is that the United States suffered greatly from being ‘entangled’ in a ‘quagmire’ in Indo-China, and should henceforth be extremely prudent about overseas military commitments. Jimmy Carter put it very gruffly, when he said that both America and ...”

“... mistakes, so sooner or later the letters all got lost in a grey blur. Not many in the babies’ class learned to read or write by this method. That didn’t matter too much, though. Hanmer Church of England School was less concerned with teaching its pupils reading, writing or arithmetic, than with obedience and knowing things by heart. Soon you’d be able ...”

“... quality which might be described as a trapped and backward-looking anger: the Protestant working class is unique in Europe, ‘in that it is the only working class not to have been radicalised by World War One.’ When UVF terrorists were imprisoned in Long Kesh they named their huts ...”

“... him irrevocably. His affaires were conducted with ex-public-schoolboys or foreigners of the same class, not with pick-ups, sailors or even guardsmen. How unlike the home life of our own dear Driberg! In 1909, despite a poor academic performance at Balliol, Harold Nicolson followed family tradition into the Foreign Office. He thus knew the world of the old ...”

“... so important at the time. Both the books discussed here describe the strike as more like a civil war than an industrial dispute. It began in March 1984 and ended a year later, after a majority of the miners had gone back to work over the preceding months, disillusioned, scared by the violence, or starved back (miners got little strike pay and no state ...”

“... new novel, like her last one, The Beginning of Spring, is set just before the First World War. Its locale, 1912 Cambridge, is not much less exotic than its predecessor’s Moscow, but it is entirely convincing: Fitzgerald’s pre-1914 worlds are wonderfully circumstantial. The book is short and full of activity. The story moves swiftly in unexpected ...”

“... or ‘How fantastically modern!’? It was not till some years after the Second World War that ‘pitbrew girls’ ceased to do the heavy and dirty work of separating out dross from coal; many of them became canteen workers instead. Joe Gormley was, and is, firmly against the idea of any ‘modern young ladies’ trying to secure coal-face ...”

“... Between 1946 and 1964, a period known as La Violencia in Colombia, a proxy war between mostly peasant partisans of the Liberal and Conservative Parties resulted in so many deaths that, in order for terror to have any effect, ever more sadistic methods of torture had to be dreamed up. In the mountains and hot valleys west of Bogotá, new styles of mutilation entered the argot: the ‘necktie cut’ involved pulling the victim’s tongue through a slit in the throat, while in the ‘florist’s cut’ severed limbs were arranged in the open cavity of the neck following decapitation ...”

“... individualism and now, most urgently, from the latest migration of Teutonic barbarism. When war broke out, President Poincaré’s call for an end to internal division and ideological strife was universally accepted. Politicians, intellectuals, civil and religious leaders sank their differences and rose as one to declare that serving France was an ...”

“... the thing that brought in the money with the obsession that underpins all his work: social class. Wheatley suffered from a sickly adoration of the rich and well-born, and a contrasting suspicion of the masses and any political system that allowed them any influence. One of the odder pieces of writing he produced was a ‘letter to posterity’ – it ...”

“... this gifted man, then a disenchanted studio musician, into forming a band; Goodman took on a top-class black ex-bandleader as his arranger, devised a jazz sound rather than playing routine commercial dance-music and, not least, mixed black musicians with white ones. Thanks to Hammond’s contacts, he recorded, and got the engagements which implied radio ...”

“... London Season: ‘Every tart in London can get in.’ Kynaston appreciates the respect for working-class values which he associates with the work of Williams, Young and Richard Hoggart, and before that of D.H. Lawrence, and which would appear here to have followed on a spell of postwar indifference. The working class is ...”