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“... The Great War was the war of the great war poets. Was ‘the war to end all wars’ also the war to end all war poetry? The best part of Jon Stallworthy’s introduction to his Oxford Book of War Poetry is a discussion of the chivalric ideal in the British public school classes of the 19th century ...”

“... one could object and say that she never took her prestige and committed it publicly against the war, but still ...It’s annoying to have to call her ‘Jackie’ – nothing is more irritating than the use of celeb nicknames like ‘Di’ and ‘Ollie’ and ‘O.J.’ – but there isn’t much by way of an alternative shorthand. ‘Mrs Kennedy’ won’t ...”

“... Elitists are a cheerless class and Vilfredo Pareto was no exception. He certainly led a cheerless life. He gave up a career as an engineer for writing and politics, but although he succeeded Léon Walras to the Chair of Political Economy at Lausanne he never obtained an academic post in Italy itself, and on the two occasions on which he stood for parliament in that country he was defeated (as he saw it) by corruption ...”

“... is recycled from a novel by the great Prussian novelist Fontane. His storm was the Napoleonic war, hers is the Second World War. All the male members of her family perished in it, some at the front, others because they took part in the July conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. She herself helped to plan some of the local ...”

“... eight museum buildings in ammunition factories built into the mountainside during the Second World War. The museum will have a particular focus on the city’s role during the war: it was Chiang Kai-shek’s provisional capital and was bombed by the Japanese. It will also tell the story of the site itself, and display some ...”

“... and Beit Nouba) had stood until 1967. They were destroyed in that year’s war by the democracy’s army, who also put roadblocks around their perimeter and planted a forest where the streets had been, just to make sure the people who’d lived there wouldn’t be able to come back one day to perform their democratic duty. It was a ...”

“... Geoffrey Parker’s new book on the Thirty Years’ War is the first major study of the subject to appear in English for nearly half a century. To be more exact, it is now 47 years since the publication of a book on the war by C.V. Wedgwood, as she was then. That graceful and perceptive study – a remarkable achievement for a 28-year-old historian – remains an example of traditional narrative history at its formal best ...”

“... cease with the worldwide triumph of Western liberalism. The blunt political message that the Cold War is over and the West has won is softened by suitably edifying references to high social theory. Much of his essay is taken up with a discussion of Hegel. Essays of this kind do not attract massive media attention because they make the right up-market ...”

“... Writing and Writers 19, the main character of Harry Mulisch’s ‘Antique Air’ thinks of the war as ‘an almost impenetrable barrier of death, fear, hunger’, separating him from his childhood. Yet paradoxically, the war is ‘perhaps his most precious possession, without which he can hardly imagine himself. Nor can ...”

“... in the calabar bean is a carbamate, one of the two major classes of nerve agent. The other class is organophosphates, the active ingredient in many insecticides and herbicides.Synthesis of nerve agents began, almost by accident, at the German chemical conglomerate I.G. Farben. In the 1930s most known pesticides were produced using hydrocarbons. Since ...”

“... prisoners on parole. With this massive security clampdown went a campaign to Puritanise the land. War was waged on non-Puritan and anti-Puritan culture. Energetic action, sometimes enforced by soldiers, was taken against alehouses, drunkenness, maypoles, neglect of the sabbath and various forms of what the Government press called ‘mirths and ...”

“... a ‘better’ game than they (although it might be) but because they have lost their character as class ‘badges’ – activities which affirm and legitimate ‘middle classness’ (Rugby Union) or ‘working classness’ (Rugby League). The decay of cricket has, no doubt, many causes, but one is competition from football. As the football season is ...”

“... is named after him – and yet be entirely at home in the comfortable drawing-rooms of the middle class Labor intelligentsia, sipping, and commenting on, the Hunter Valley claret. Nor was he ill at ease with capitalists. He used to lunch once a month with Sir Roderick Carnegie, the head of the big mining firm CRA that is the Australian offshoot of the giant ...”

“... Wealth, size and speed were not ‘unsinkable’ after all. Two years before the First World War, some cherished modern certainties appeared to be crumbling. We have been hearing the phrase again lately, and the blurb informs us that Enzensberger’s Titanic is ‘an emblem for the modern predicament’. Enzensberger is mesmerised by such idioms. ‘We ...”

“... to the extent that cultural production got overshadowed by the long-arriving Second World War. The more the international situation became a cause for despair, the more tempting it became to concentrate your attention on your own offshore island. The more mandatory, you might claim: some sort of patriotism was forced on artists, pushing them ...”