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“... estate in Bukovina in 1914. Bukovina was Austrian in those days, Romanian after the First World War, and Russian after the second. The Rezzoris were minor Austrian gentry administering the outposts of empire, more like the British in India than like the magnates who entertained Patrick Leigh-Fermor when he passed through the Balkans. There was Italian blood ...”

“... by artificial Soviet-era borders, a tinderbox ready to ignite. This view emerged during the Cold War, but it has taken on new life since the Soviet collapse. Those who hold it argue that the ‘national-territorial delimitation’ of 1924, which transformed tsarist Turkestan into a series of nominally nation-based republics, represented a cynical attempt at ...”

“... us in income per head. In his magisterial new history of the economic policies of the post-war Labour Government, Sir Alec Cairncross shows that our industrial production was larger than that of France and Germany combined. It was 50 per cent above the 1938 figure, compared with 20 per cent in France and 10 per cent in Germany. France and Germany ...”

“... The English Civil War occupies a strange niche in contemporary memory. To all official appearances, no episode of the country’s modern past is so parenthetical. Leaving no reputable trace in common traditions or public institutions, it looks in established retrospect like a temporary black-out in the growth of the national psyche ...”

“... who spent her days counting other people’s sneezes.’ And now we are in the world of middle-class control, eavesdropping and gossiping. The unseemly vitality of the sneeze. The little old lady gets her comeuppance in a cloud of black pepper cast from a victim’s window.When war came, Rodari was too small and sickly ...”

“... fifty years ago: Sebastian Haffner’s tremendous Failure of a Revolution. Haffner, who spent the war in Britain, returned to West Germany in the 1960s to become the giant of left-wing but non-Marxist commentary. When his book was first published in German in 1969, it bore the title Die Verratene Revolution – the betrayed revolution – an adjective much ...”

“... were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. ‘Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was associating with people who were infinitely my social inferiors,’ Wildeblood replied; but the war was over and with it the Bakhtinian moment of misrule when the strings of degree were untuned and, to ...”

“... the Maoist guerrillas, who model themselves on the Shining Path in Peru, and whose ‘people’s war’ has claimed more than 11,000 lives since 1996. Even fewer tourists have ventured to Nepal since 1 February this year, when King Gyanendra, citing the threat presented by the Maoists, grounded all flights, cut off phone and internet lines, arrested ...”

“... after he showed two Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to pupils during a civics class on freedom of expression. A few days later, three people were murdered, and several injured, in a knife attack at the basilica of Notre-Dame in Nice. The attacks, all carried out in the name of Islam, took place nearly six years after the atrocities at ...”

“... being parachuted into power at the whim of an authoritarian monarch, while only the Second World War and a German invasion rescued the Croatian Fascist Ante Pavelic from the monotony of exile and enabled him to attain power in Zagreb. Vidkun Quisling became Norwegian prime minister in exactly the same way as Pavelic, and almost immediately found himself ...”

“... agreements’, which customarily include no-strike clauses; beneath the core would be a sub-class consisting of the unemployed and unskilled, of part-time workers and women, blacks and foreigners. Here, it was said, was the real nature of the split emerging in the TUC. Some support for this theory was provided by an officer of the EEPTU who told the ...”

“... Even now most discussion of Second World War poetry cannot do without reference back to that of the First; and it’s true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness ...”

“... from which the country’s workers and peasants could only be liberated by a ‘People’s War’ on the Chinese model. The movement was incubated in the 1960s at the University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Ayacucho, under the leadership of Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy professor. Born in 1934, Guzmán was the illegitimate son of an accountant on a ...”

“... I had managed only one speech against the war in Kosovo when I was carted off to hospital in the middle of the night with what I later discovered was an aortic aneurism. Hardly had the surgeons opened me up than my aorta, an artery which runs from heart to head, ruptured. Almost all such ruptures end in death, and for many weeks I lay in a coma ...”

“... The deliberate anonymity of the Official History of British Intelligence in the Second World War needs to be supplemented with the personal memoirs of those closely involved, and Noel Annan appears well suited to the task. In 1941 he joined the Military Intelligence Division of the War Office, and worked in section ...”