“... well as senators and generals, but in all cases the emphasis is on the concern of the Roman upper class to stress the exemplary and spectacular nature of such deaths. Spectacle had always been a part of Roman valour: in war, both the ritual act of devotio – in which a military leader sacrifices his life to the gods in ...”

“... of ‘vaccine passports’, and noting that she had just appeared on Steve Bannon’s hard-right War Room webcast. ‘Look, I’m a progressive Democrat,’ Wolf said. ‘I would be delighted to be talking to CNN and MSNBC and publishing in the New York Times like I used to, but those are not the platforms that are calling me, they aren’t the ones who want ...”

“... the 20th century as one of the hubs of Asian communism, and in the decades after the Second World War, all the century’s ideologies made an appearance there. A onetime Fabian, Lee Kuan Yew modelled Singapore’s postwar welfare state and housing system partly on Attlee’s Britain, of which it became a hyperbolic version (the Singaporean government today ...”

“... creeping aggression in the north. Army recruits were given lectures on ‘The Coming Sino-Japanese War’ and ‘How to Make Sacrifices’. Not everyone shared the enthusiasm. Children at a school in Jiangsu who were too poor to buy their textbooks complained that they would have to ‘sell their bodies to the pawnshop’ to raise the cash. College students in ...”

“... active agents for, Mussolini and Hitler at a time when the British Government was about to declare war on Italy and Germany. Mr Higham’s book has been greeted with a tremendous shout of fury. ‘Universally slated’ was how Sidgwick and Jackson described its reception to me. It has been passed over for serialisation. Film rights, once assured, are now in ...”

“... be mild: slightly pained but not alarmed. English people old enough to remember the Second World War often said: ‘Seems a pity after all we’ve been through together. But it’s their right, isn’t it?’ Nobody seemed to have given much thought to the value of the union. This April, 40 per cent of a UK sample – which means an even higher percentage of ...”

“... between the two games go beyond the question of payment. There has always been an element of class struggle in their mutual antipathy. Union has its roots in the middle-class South of England: its players are largely professional men and its administrators products of the days of empire, whereas League, born in the ...”

“... US was still singling out his term in office as ‘the most fruitful and productive in the post-war years’. This upside to the Nixon picture is much to the fore in Aitken’s adoring biography. It is a strange coming-together: Aitken, the hereditary Tory, born with a large silver spoon in his mouth, and the lower-...”

“... grandfather built ships for the Nazis. My mother, who was born in 1937, told us stories about the war at bedtime. She used to argue with my brother about the degree of her father’s complicity. Part of the heat of these arguments came from the fact that our father is Jewish, from New York, and his family gave him hell for marrying a Christian from ...”

“... development the ‘shorter 20th century’ had managed to generate a new relatively advantaged class, which aspired to something a lot better. Civil society seemed to have got way ahead of itself, for socio-economic reasons, yet lacked any correspondingly new political forms: it was rebellious yet formless. The resultant disorientation gave the old world ...”

“... can be defined as a thin-skinned humanism for enlightened and sensitive members of the capitalist class who do not desire the outer world to be such as might be prone to cause them any displeasing impression.’ And much more in that vein. Virginia Woolf, all the same, picked up some displeasing impressions about the future of this man whose mind she ...”

“... of debate about the reasons for this descent into violence. Writing after the Second World War, Marxist historians like Georges Lefebvre understood the Terror of 1793-94 as a matter of national survival. By 1792, France faced invasion by the Austrian and Prussian armies; royalist insurgencies in Brittany, Lyon and the Vendée; defection among senior ...”

“... decision to stay in America than any large reflections upon the state of the world, the impending war, or his position as a coterie poet in London. Still, his experience in America showed Auden that he could live more freely in New York than in London, and elude the demands upon him which issued from his being leader of the English band. American readers ...”

“... the only branch of Weimar literature that broke out of the Central European enclosure was the anti-war fiction of the late 1920s, headed by Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Naturally, it was filmed by Universal, the only Hollywood studio headed by a native German. What, looking back, was so characteristic about the culture of a shortlived German ...”

“... I am satisfied the war is over,’ declared N.K. Sharma, the World Health Organisation representative in India. Certainly the war against the plague has disappeared from the newspapers and the airwaves. Business India, the fortnightly gospel of the country’s burgeoning corporate sector, questioned whether there had been a plague epidemic at all ...”