“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... inhuman forces that shaped it, the stones, the seasons, the grain price, the gentry, the coming of war and sheep and the ‘great machines’. Gibbon knew this life from the inside, being of ‘the Land’, ‘of peasant rearing and peasant stock’, himself; it was a life, he thought, of ‘narrowness and bitterness and heart-breaking toil’. But not without ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... For four decades​ El Salvador was known for death squads and civil war, and then for gang violence. But now, under President Nayib Bukele, the gangs that carved up the country have been routed. The members of the pandillas – the two main gangs were Mara Salvatrucha (or MS-13) and Barrio 18 (split into two factions, the Revolucionarios and Sureños) – have been imprisoned or have scattered ...”

“... riding a horse called Proletarian Strength travels around with his Sancho Panza during the Civil War, observing the bizarre efforts of various isolated idealists to make a new revolutionary life. The novella Vprok (For Future Benefit) applied a similar approach to collectivisation. The Foundation Pit, never published in Platonov’s lifetime because of the ...”

“... like tens of thousands of other families, were nearly a year into a bewildering, unnatural war. Mobilised troops struggled to work out where they were, never mind what they were doing or why. Robert Rodway was 28, but many of his fellow soldiers in the Westminster Red Regiment were much younger, just apprentices. None had fought before; only a few in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to it – indeed its existence was first exposed to the world by the publication of Djilas’s New Class in 1956. The fullest account of the phenomenon in the Soviet Union is contained in Michael Voslensky’s Nomenklatura (1984). This shows how the privileged – by rank and, increasingly, by birth – are sealed off from the many intractable problems of ...”