“... Warships​ are built for war, but not only for war. They have always had an eloquent symbolic value as expressions of power, wealth and resolve, as instruments of threat or reassurance. They speak this language in peacetime just as much as in war ...”

“... al-Sadat attended a parade to mark the anniversary of the crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war with Israel. It was also an occasion to display the American, British and French aircraft Egypt had recently acquired: symbols of its realignment with the West after more than two decades as a Soviet ally. Sadat wore a Prussian-style uniform but no ...”

“... to demythologise ‘Thatcherism’. Mrs Thatcher has enjoyed two advantages over any other post-war premier. First, her arrival in Downing Street coincided with North Sea oil. The importance of this windfall to the Government’s political survival is incalculable. It has brought almost 70 billion pounds into the Treasury coffers since 1979, which is ...”

“... their own superiority. One of these was the remnant of the old territorial aristocracy, the upper class which had been inconvenienced by austerity and the postwar lack of servants but which still held on to its country seats and its influence. Another was the world of the two ‘historic’ English universities – the ‘top’ colleges of Oxford in ...”

“... and dilemmas of collaboration, of families divided, of fighting on one’s own soil, of civil war – the stuff of life for most Europeans only forty years ago, and a more recent or continuing reality for millions in the Third World. As for revolution, its literature by and large has been for us the literature of the revolution betrayed, the revolution ...”

“... a white English-speaking male preoccupation, founded in a selective view of history that portrays war as inevitable, noble and glorious, where Britain and the majority white countries of its former empire repeatedly come together to defeat a savage foe (Prussian militarism, in Norton-Griffiths’s case, but it might just as well be Nazi Germany, the Soviet ...”

“... the book. Yet less than a decade before Ferguson’s idyllic stay there, Kenya had been wracked by war, with much bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities on all sides. It was wrong to say that ‘scarcely anything had changed.’ Not that the young Ferguson would have been aware of that in the 1960s; but by the time he came to write his book, some knowledge of it ...”

“... historic ruling party. They are now mired as Labour was in the 1930s, and it took the Second World War to get Labour out of the mire. In some senses the Labour vote is also alarmingly low: but it is remarkably efficient. Not many votes are needed to elect a Labour MP. The Conservative performance was not uniformly bad: they did well, for instance, in ...”

“... out in Panama, but he was dispatched a month later by US troops in Washington’s first post-Cold War invasion. There was still Fidel Castro, but Cuba was isolated, having lost its Soviet Bloc trading partners. By June 1990, Bush père could claim that a ‘rising tide of democracy, never before witnessed in this beloved hemisphere’ would soon make possible ...”

“... Left 8.30 a.m. for Sandown High School where from 9.15 to 11, talked to sixth-form Spanish/French class about the Civil War and Surrealism. Went on to pick up Hilda and Edward Upward and take them out to lunch at a Shanklin restaurant. They’re not so indignant about Bush and the war as ...”

“... had to know him well to get an inkling of that. More obviously he was handsome, dandyish, an upper-class socialist. He liked cricket, bridge (with, among others, the ‘Machiavellian’ David Sylvester), chess (with Martin Amis, who felt humbly as if he always had, or anyway always ought to have, the black pieces). Women found him instantly attractive. And he ...”

“... American films about the war in Vietnam were slow in coming. Saigon fell in 1975, and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter both date from 1978. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was 1979. In their separate ways these films were all about damage done to Americans; any damage done to others was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn’t going to get told ...”

“... degradation of Tredegar between the wars, but just young enough to have benefited from the post-war Welfare State and the Sixties expansion of higher education. (A typical product of that expansion, who was able to pick up qualifications casually and without exertion while concentrating his energies on rugby and the Students’ Union, he is far less well ...”

“... and “serious” person you knew – left or right – was for the war.’ ‘I am not a radical,’ Coates said. Even so he found it ‘searing’ to watch ‘reasonable people assemble sober arguments for a disaster’. In retrospect, the most remarkable of these reasonable people were not the neoconservatives but the liberals ...”

“... or Alexander, or Stonewall Jackson, by far the most talented commander of the American Civil War. To them it was – or became – like a drug, an addiction that could not be given up. Had he lived, Alexander might have invaded Italy through the Balkans, or attacked Carthage and Spain along the African coast, anticipating the Arab invasions of eight ...”