“... about the rights and wrongs. The place was ours, and we went and took it back.’ In The Winter War, Patrick Bishop and John Witherow (who went with the Task Force for the Observer and the Times) conclude: The war had everything in its favour. It was neat and tidy. It had a simple motive and a simple response … No ...”

“... declining Mirror could be saved only if it was turned into a lively, iconoclastic, working-class paper. With the help of a new editor Bartholomew started the transformation in 1933, using the New York Daily News as a model. Bill Connor, who would become the columnist ‘Cassandra’, was recruited from J. Walter Thompson, where he had been a ...”

“... on this scale against so much competition cannot be attributed merely to the preference of middle-class parents for books about genteel children. As Brogan reminds us, Ransome could write with real sympathy about lower-class children and adults, and his middle-class ‘Swallows’ surely ...”

“... air and knew or suspected the truth: here was a man locked in combat over the future of a working-class party who was born to privilege, who sought the company, within the Party, of fellow Wykehamists (Richard Crossman, Douglas Jay), other public school boys (Benn, Crosland) or public school wannabes like Roy Jenkins, and who, to top it all, was having an ...”

“... Daughter’, say, or The Marble Faun. Especially since the Second World War, most 20th-century commentators have preferred to echo Melville’s celebrated remarks on his contemporary’s ‘great power of blackness’. If we are to credit Dearest Beloved, T. Walter Herbert’s dramatic reinterpretation of life among the ...”

“... set of urban legends has sprung up around her visit to Hanoi in the summer of 1972: a prisoner of war, ordered by his captors to describe his ‘lenient and humane’ treatment to the visiting actress, spat on her instead and was beaten almost into blindness; prisoners secretly gave her their social security numbers to prove their existence to the outside ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”