“... genius, one third blackguard and one third lunatic’), into documentation from the Spanish Civil War, and into the partly unsorted mountain of Koestler papers at Edinburgh University, which holds his correspondence with hundreds of often famous friends and antagonists throughout the world. Scammell seems to have interviewed almost every surviving human being ...”

“... novels, set in the first half of the present century and significantly concerned with world war, its origins and aftermath. Garden, Ashes and Star Turn, though unlike in most other respects, share a preoccupation with the Holocaust. Danilo Kis’s novel is a lament for the passing of the Central European petty bourgeoisie. In one scene a Jewish ...”

“... the Napoleonic romance lay in its transformation of old snobberies into new and dynamic forms of class behaviour and class vitality. Stendhal’s hero, Fabrizio del Dongo, comes of an ancient and grand Piedmontese family, and is himself ecstatically converted to the values and promises of the new order, while at the same ...”

“... expanded and every trifling incident magnified, until dear good Austen begins to rank as a first-class bore – he is so insistent as to be a positive fatigue.’ This tart commentary was provided by David Alexander Edward Lindsay, better-known (after he succeeded his father in 1913) as the 27th Earl of Crawford, and probably best-known as the tenth Earl of ...”

“... puzzle’. He continued to defend the controversial thesis of The Origins of the Second World War, and to be hurt and irritated by those who imagined that this book was an apology for Hitler. But the letters suggest that he viewed The Origins as increasingly unimportant, as the cutting edge of new historical research shifted away from the Anglo-German ...”

“... of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Trump had fun outing the AIPAC purchasers of the US political class. ‘Isn’t that right, Miriam?’ he shouted over to the widow of the Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson.Miriam and Sheldon would come into the [Oval] Office … I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else … Look at her, sitting ...”

“... the way history touched on our small town. Yet we were surrounded by it: during the Second World War our grandparents’ house had been taken over by German officers, and they were sent away to work as agricultural labourers. They were lucky: our great-grandfather was killed in a German bombing raid in 1940, while the father of my cousin Guy was executed by ...”

“... Britain emerged from the war still unquestionably a great power, its Prime Ministers Churchill and Attlee considered the equals in negotiations for the post-war settlement, of America’s Presidents Roosevelt and Truman and Soviet dictator Stalin at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences of 1945 ...”

“... soldiers at the rare roadblocks are the products of a very different military culture: during the war that brought this regime to power, hundreds of children attached themselves to the guerrillas because they meant security in a world ripped apart by the casual state terrorism of Obote’s men. The bitter history of the post-Independence years is ...”

“... The author of ‘Naming of Parts’, probably the most anthologised English poem of the Second War, has too often been held to be that and that only. Like Julian Grenfell, author of ‘Into Battle’, he is seen as the saddest freak of the literary fairground: the one-poem poet. The publication of his collected poems will give the lie to that gross misperception ...”

“... politics, or so it then seemed. A Chancellor of the Federal Republic had broken through the Cold War barricades and visited the German Democratic Republic for the first time. He writes in these memoirs: Can there have been any other [day] in my whole life charged with more emotion? On the other side of the border between the Germanies, the road was lined ...”

“... in action in France in 1917, who wrote on the flyleaf of his diary: ‘America must win this war.’ Fact-checkers had found no corroboration of the story: there was no diary, no record of Treptow’s burial in Arlington. No matter. Reagan kept it in, describing the crosses at Arlington, and the young soldier, buried under ‘one such marker’, who had ...”

“... field kitchens with fires burning and army cooks stirring the regimental stew. They don’t wage war like that any more. Indeed the big wars are rarely now between neighbours: one state will cross a continent or an ocean to attack or invade, or occasionally to defend, another. The choreographed exchange of diplomatic threats, the ultimatum, the formal ...”

“... Wall came down. One reason given was that the traditional agent of Marxist revolution, the working class, had been wiped out by changes to the capitalist system – or at least was no longer in a majority. It is true that the industrial proletariat had dwindled, but Marx himself did not think that the working class was ...”

“... the ‘crushed, strangled feeling that had driven me close to madness’. During the Second World War, Bevan had been responsible, almost single-handedly, for keeping oppositional politics going in the Commons, repeatedly challenging Churchill’s running of the country and the war. Churchill described him as a ‘squalid ...”