“... traitor who had sided with the Algerian ‘terrorists’. Unease in France with the memory of that war has bordered on denial, although recent revelations of French atrocities are forcing a re-evaluation of the country’s colonial past. Outside France, Fanon was regarded as a leading intellectual associated with the doctrine of ‘Third Worldism’, which had ...”

“... that Scotland was sociologically hostile to the right as a result of its large industrial working class, so right-wing success had to be a matter of ideology. Unionism benefited from Protestantism and imperial pride, but also from its careful articulation of Scottish identity, which has been described by Graeme Morton as ‘unionist-nationalism’. As ...”

“... was, whether it really existed and what the ridicule meant, as it was about the British working class and how it had been progressively disempowered and de-emancipated, first by the Conservatives, and then more decisively by New Labour. The Establishment, too, starts from a stereotype (the phrase was first used in its common modern sense by Henry Fairlie in ...”

“... Last year​ – year one of the Great War centenary – David Jones’s In Parenthesis, a long prose-and-verse evocation of his first months as a soldier, got a decent outing. The poet Owen Sheers drew on the text for his play Mametz at National Theatre Wales in the summer; Faber reissued the book with T.S. Eliot’s introduction in its series Poets of the Great War; and in Poetry of the First World War (2013), Tim Kendall chose a fine sequence of extracts – sticking to the verse where he could – even though he reckoned that Jones is ‘by far the most difficult [poet] to anthologise ...”

“... of the Jewish National Fund’s land department and a formidable ethnic cleanser in the 1948 war and during the 1950s. Oscillating between the political views of his two uncles, Yizhar has produced a richly ironic yet wholly committed account of the 20th century’s most successful settler project. It is in every sense a complex account, and in some ...”

“... to Germany a much better businessman, and a polished renegade. The Condition of the Working Class in England followed in 1845. He moved to Paris, moved in with Marx, and when he wasn’t pursuing women, began to chase the dragon’s tail of revolution in the French capital, in Brussels and back in southern Germany. Engels returned to the Rhineland and ...”

“... Is it just a coincidence that one of this spring’s most popular films was called Civil War?My dictionary defines ‘myth’ as both a popular tradition that embodies core social values and an ‘unfounded or false’ idea. The word hints at intentional distortion of the truth. But truth is more or less beside the point in Slotkin’s discussion of ...”

“... had experienced herself, she didn’t like to travel, and her friends were few and from her own class. Her situation, she comforted herself, was like Jane Austen’s. She was contented: ‘I have had a rather uneventful life, thank God.’ Her greatest grief (‘almost’), Beauman writes, was when, near the end of her life, the New Yorker stopped accepting ...”

“... explains in his perceptive new book, each constructed a myth about France’s behaviour during the war that served its own political interests; each claimed it had led the Resistance. According to the Gaullist narrative, France went to war in 1939 weakened by internal political struggles. It was quickly crushed in 1940 by ...”

“... homosexuality and his poetry – he wrote some bad poetry – but in his view that there was a new class of ‘working artisans’ rising, and that ‘there is undoubtedly an entirely new (social) state of affairs coming about through their rise, and I hail it with delight.’ His increasingly open homosexuality came hand in glove with socialism. He liked the ...”

“... the realm of popular culture. From youth onwards he was a best-selling writer in the categories of war, travel and adventure. The Second World War turned him into a movie star, prompting him to remark in 1942 that he had already sold the film rights of his war memoirs. Later, Jack le ...”

“... wrote to him: ‘In a few centuries the common man will know our time as the period of the World War, but the educated man will connect the first quarter of the century with your name.’ This salute from one German-Jewish Nobel laureate to another was written six months before the Wall Street Crash helped to make National Socialism a mass movement, and it ...”

“... the Sikh wars, with one side supporting the Sikhs and the other the British. With the first Indian war of independence in 1857 (known in English history books as the Mutiny) there was the same division. I used to think, cynically, that the top echelons of the family did this deliberately: support both sides so that whichever faction of the ruling ...”

“... cause), Keynesian economics before it was fashionable, German civilians at the war’s end – you really can’t fault her. She was so wonderfully clear-sighted that it’s not even surprising to find her warning of the possibility of a Nazi-Soviet pact two years before the event. Since all the positions she took, no matter how ...”

“... poured tea from a big brass kettle while I asked him about the effects of more than two decades of war on the community. The collapse of the postal service was one of the more trivial consequences that he mentioned, but there was something moving about a village that hadn’t received a letter for 21 years. One of the hateful results of the long ...”