“... he first read Marx. A Francophile in his adolescence, Stedman Jones had worked in Paris for Agence France-Presse before starting at Oxford. Back in England, he fell in with the group coalescing around the New Left Review, and by 1965 was on its editorial board under Perry Anderson. While their elders on the left – the generation of E.P. Thompson and ...”

“... fortunate’ that the ‘poets who got badly involved in the war were all infantrymen in France’. Living in an environment where around half of one’s friends were slaughtered by snipers, mortars and machine guns is an odd form of good fortune; but by describing it this way Graves acknowledged how deeply being a part of mechanised and impersonal ...”

“... for his own psychic traumas. In this reading Delany is following Brandt’s earlier critics, David Mellor and Ian Jeffrey, who identified in Brandt’s photographs coded expressions of his disturbed psyche. They contain what Delany identifies as ‘symbols and obsessions peculiar to himself’.Ever since Brandt became the focus of academic study in the ...”

“... the one person Genghiz had feared and respected.) Kitbuga may have been inspired to try playing David at Goliath’s Spring: at any rate he attacked the Sultan (who inspired his own soldiers with the cry of ‘O Islam’) without the usual Mongol craft and precaution, and lost his army and his life. Had Hulagu been able to return he would certainly have ...”

“... deeply embedded in the conflicts of regional interest of a country more than twice the size of France. The differences were acute between the peoples of the High Plateau, chiefly Ovimbundu isolated in the far interior, and those of the Atlantic seaboard and its ports, which traded with Europe. In 1861 the Governor-General, Calheiros e Menezes, had remarked ...”

“... away from the eyes of the international community. The ‘autonomy’ envisaged by the Camp David agreements is unlikely to extend beyond garbage collection. Ostensibly Two Minutes over Baghdad is a True Life Adventure Story in the ‘Entebbe’ tradition, in which an author trades his skills as a publicist against ‘inside’ information supplied by ...”

“... still bandaged, back into the line; he was captured, sentenced to death, and finally released into France. Everything that he has to say is interesting, whether about how much he was paid (he’d expected nothing) and what he did with it (gave it to the war effort, there being nothing to spend it on), or about the horrors of battle. He describes unforgettably ...”

“... hero’s refusal to meet his mother at a victory dinner; the arm’s-length relations with his son David, whom he temporarily disinherited after his divorce (the first in the family); the decision to cut his brother Brian’s wedding and go to a football match instead; and other incidents showing a perverse insensitivity. The Princesse de Merode, whose chateau ...”

“... from atom to hydrogen bomb – in the US, 1945, 1952; Russia, 1949, 1953; Britain, 1952, 1957; France, 1960, 1968.) The atomic bomb, like the war itself, is now history, no longer a living experience. Even in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘there now were more and more children who did not know who dropped the bomb, or when; who were not worried about political ...”

“... the 17th century that would challenge what she and her friends saw as the Tory version supplied by David Hume. The first volume was an immediate bestseller when it appeared in 1763, and so to a lesser extent were its four successors which were all published before 1773. Insisting on and obtaining what was then the quite extraordinary sum of £1000 per ...”

“... even married her Antony a good few times. The early stages of European portraiture began, the late David Piper suggested in his 1992 study, The English Face, with tomb-effigies in the 12th century. Neither beauty nor individuality were the point of these monuments in death to rank, wealth and piety. None of these portraits in stone looks like anyone I have ...”

“... has come to a head faster than expected as a result of the Scottish independence referendum and David Cameron’s political ambition. Labour has (or had) an electoral interest in keeping Scotland in the Union. The Conservatives do not. Their loyalty to the United Kingdom is sentimental, not electoral. The practical argument against Scottish independence was ...”

“... of US debt. The deal on offer to the Republicans was described by the conservative commentator David Brooks as ‘the deal of the century’, offering ‘trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases’: A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth ...”

“... twinklers of an hour, provoke my rage’) for Pope himself. Gerrard follows Howard Weinbrot and David Fairer in championing Hill’s biblical odes The Creation (1720) and The Judgment Day (1721) as significant expositions of the sublime in an age addicted to correctness; but the argument isn’t likely to persuade readers confronted by lines as poor as the ...”

“... the French Ambassador. The patriotic hero, it turned out, had venally conspired with foreigners. David Hume, who had earlier mocked the Sidney cult, found it ‘amusing to observe the general and I may say national rage’. Shortly after the exposure of Sidney, John Wilkes – in the House of Commons, of all places – extolled Cromwell’s ...”