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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the abolition of the Caliphate following the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. A degree of order was effectively restored to it by intelligent nationalist movements which, once in power, promoted a ‘national Islam’, the better to subject religion to raison d’état and curb its more dangerous and sectarian enthusiasms. During the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... genteel compilations typical of the history of British art in the decades after the Second World War. I was particularly struck by Waterhouse’s concern with the pedigrees of the painters he discussed, men like Thomas Jones, Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good ...”

“... authority. The ‘in’ period in historical writing just now seems to be the period of the post-war Labour Government. In fiction, the Second World War novel still has a long way to run. Every British novelist born since 1930 seems to find it necessary to write one. Most writers now use historical and documentary sources ...”

“... framework for everything that followed was set by Attlee: he was the one who had to face the Cold War, who authorised the building of a British atom bomb and drew up detailed preparations for World War Three. The Chiefs of Staff, fearing an imminent Soviet attack, threatened their collective resignation in order to force ...”