“... and those questions are ones that I find troubling. I was born, not long before the Second World War, in the United States, where until the age of nine I lived in a succession of different towns and states, of which New York was the last, the place from which I left the country for good. I didn’t know at the time that we weren’t going back; and it was ...”

“... 1911 Official Secrets Act (‘the actual change in the law is slight,’ claimed the Secretary for War, quite disingenuously); but the Incitement to Disaffection Act of 1934 runs it pretty close. That was presented as nothing more than a tidying up of the 1797 Incitement to Mutiny Act, and as offering ‘an easier, swifter and more suitable remedy and ...”

“... a bibliography, which takes up half the pages. Still, there are some handsome pictures on first-class paper, the result of a collaboration between the Oxford University Press and the Pierpont Morgan Library. There are also 25 essays, some of them lazily written but four of them, at least, rather good. Three of the four are by Richard Usborne, the king of ...”

“... history faculty – had already published a radical marxisant version of the 1879-82 Irish Land War, stressing the only partly suppressed war of interests between large and small tenants as much as the struggle against the landlord oppressor, and casting a cold eye on the cloak of unity that nationalist historiography ...”

“... Of these, some have footnotes, some don’t. Of three ‘extended chapters’ on mock-heroic and war, ‘which in a sense form the core of the book’, two (‘approximately half the book’) are largely new and elaborately documented. The purpose of this disjointedness: to ‘capture and analyse stress points’ in a design better adapted to nuance, it is ...”

“... As a consequence, Palestinians are left to excavate the bodies of their dead from the ruins of war and rebury them in the open-air cemetery of Gaza. The difficulty of the task arises not just from its magnitude – how to grieve more than seventy thousand people, a third of that number children? – but also from an ongoing occupation that erodes the ...”

“... struggle to rise from the drudgery of manual labour or the daily grind of shop keeping into middle-class society. And on arrival the upwardly mobile have earned only a dubious privilege: Here you have the professional class and the bourgeoisie. The chief characteristics of the former are complacency, various forms of ...”

“... recognition. The prevailing tone had scarcely changed since the founding historian of modern Civil War studies, the Victorian S.R. Gardiner, dismissed their adherents as wild eccentrics who lacked a ‘sense of decorum’. Now even those who take against them can’t ignore them. Hill has had a lasting semantic victory too. Como’s Radical Parliamentarians ...”

“... I still recall my acute disappointment with Michael Howard’s The Franco-Prussian War, published some thirty years ago. The subject was exciting – what with the desperate German infantry assaults at Gravelotte and the dramatic unveiling of the ultra-secret mitrailleuse – and the book was thick enough to promise much good fun to any schoolboy eager to read of battles with a threepenny bag of crisps at his side ...”

“... because once you judge anything to be ‘folk art’, the discussion can snarl up in class-based knots. Folk is ‘them’, those not talking proper, not doing the judging: most typically, in this case, the artisans of imperial, industrialising Britain, a century or so either side of 1840. ‘Folk art’ enthusiasts can’t avoid this awkward ...”

“... they rarely referred to smoking as a public health problem that might have something to do with class and racial inequality, lack of education, or unemployment. Yielding to or breaking the smoking habit was all about will, choice and moral responsibility. Who needs a public health system when sickness is a personal failure?We are now in a world, Milov ...”

“... hand to hand – sometimes against their neighbours. This was not, Theidon writes, ‘a sanitised war in which buttons were pushed and bombs delivered. The fighting was carried out with knives, rocks, slingshots, tirachas (homemade guns).’ Houses were burned and 65 per cent of the fields in Ayacucho were abandoned. The countryside was littered with pueblos ...”

“... because of the breakthrough work in computer science by Sir Alan Turing, a gay national icon, ‘war hero and presiding genius of the digital age’, who instead of committing suicide in the 1950s has become the world’s leading mathematical thinker, and a minor character here. Often the postulate of a counterfactual universe is a ...”

“... Zertal reviews some of the trials of Jewish collaborators who had immigrated to Israel after the war and were indicted under this law. These survivors were victims too, but the law required that their victimhood be suspended. Nevertheless, they were all given light sentences, as if the judges themselves had some reservations about the law. A far more ...”

“... the dilemmas that torment Aron. They first press down on him at the tender age of 11½, in English class, in the Israel of the mid-Sixties, and become an obsession through the next three years that lead to his bar mitzvah, and then on to the Six-Day War of the nation state within whose syntactical history his life is ...”