“... committed to the campaign against militarism. Although Ettinger devotes one chapter to this ‘War on War’, she understates its significance. The ‘War on War’ was not merely a feature of the crisis years 1913-14, but dates back to 1898, when ...”

“... It’s generally assumed that with the Iraq War officially over and troops withdrawing from Afghanistan, US defence spending will drop. Obama’s reference in his State of the Union address to ‘saving half a trillion dollars’ from the defence budget encouraged this assumption, as have Republican complaints that such cuts would ‘decimate’ the nation’s defences ...”

“... letters are very short, and merely contain changes of address or news of friends. They discuss the war, and the problems caused by the presence of the Germans, yet it’s striking how little the correspondence varies over the war years. They give their opinion of Sartre, with Paulhan being tactfully enthusiastic and Arland ...”

“... Strong to Save’. Archibald Wavell, one of the significant British military commanders of World War Two, as well as the penultimate viceroy of British India, was presented as a role model for the boys in those last days of empire, one of the few military figures looked favourably on by the intellectual middle class. What ...”

“... virtues of creative and morally justified imperialism had a peculiar attraction for a governing class that was increasingly, as the 20th century advanced, facing challenges to its own rule. But by 1992, when the second edition of CAH V was published, the idealisms supporting the old regime had been shattered, and the empire it had led was largely a thing of ...”

“... part of his vision. Just as now, jails were used to manage unemployment and instability in working-class life, with young Black people and those of Puerto Rican descent disproportionately affected. At that time there were two facilities on Rikers (the first opened in 1935), two in Manhattan and one each in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Together they housed ...”

“... nights. The ventriloquists, suave and cultured, will save the ignorant arriviste of the new middle class from embarrassment by carrying on a conversation on both sides of the foyer loudly enough for the wise and witty comments on the play to be overheard. The scheme, however, goes wrong when unscrupulous ventriloquists embark on a campaign of ...”

“... of the 19th-century Paris department stores, the Bon Marché, from its creation until the 1914 War. In his conclusion, however, he suggests that the Bon Marché was not an isolated enterprise but that it typified, not merely Paris stores, but French society as a whole. ‘Bourgeois culture in France was divided within itself, not so much between upper and ...”

“... British presence on the Malay peninsula. He tries to explain the outbreak of the jungle guerrilla war which began in 1948 (‘the Emergency’), to look at the politics behind that war and to identify the dire, lasting effects of the Emergency on independent Malaysia. That’s not to say that Hale has simply pasted ...”

“... best!’ A Scout is a friend to all and a brother to every other Scout, no matter to what country, class or creed the other may belong. (At least, that was the rule when I was a boy: it’s been trimmed down since. The Scout Laws are not immutable, as Paul Fussell supposes.) Let me draw friendly, fraternal attention to certain differences between the British ...”

“... commentary for despatch to London, but any hopes of witnessing the formidable Berlin intellect at war in the corridors of US power will be disappointed. Although – a trifle immodestly – he claims in his Introduction that his material was considered by Denis Brogan in London to be ‘the Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinths of American politics’, it ...”

“... before – the famous letter to Gottlob Frege in which Russell announced his discovery of the ‘class paradox’ which undermined the programme of showing the logical foundation of mathematics; and nothing that the layest of lay readers would have to struggle with, save for one absolutely unintelligible note to A. N. Whitehead just to make the point. That ...”

“... later head of Margaret Thatcher’s Central Policy Review Staff, remarked: ‘We had won the war and we voted ourselves a nice peace.’ As Hennessy himself says, ‘the Britain of the early 1950s, for all the shortages and everyday rubbing points, did have a collective sense of deliverance.’ He points acutely to movements that did not happen – for ...”

“... Murdoch Studies was inaugurated at Kingston University. Conradi in his introduction to A Writer at War is mildly critical of the film, on which he was a consultant, for ignoring Murdoch’s work and he can’t bring himself even to mention Wilson. His hope is that these letters and diaries will go further to re-establish her in the public mind as a ...”

“... historical judgment, but even fifty years on, Britain’s preparations for the Second World War hardly look inspiring. The next long spell of Tory government in the Fifties saw Britain’s conventional forces run down without revealing how her nuclear capability, which was supposed to justify this, could be made plausible. It was Macmillan’s lot to ...”