“... not.’ Freedman’s parents, Jewish refugees who settled in America, told her stories of their war years in London. That aroused her interest. Her next step was a doctoral dissertation at Indiana University, and for this she came to England and interviewed about fifty people who remembered London during the air-raids, ‘focusing on under-represented ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) and the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. From fine old buildings in Whitehall, Temple, St James’s Square and the Strand, they shape much of the foreign and defence policy analysis produced in Britain. Each institution has its own flavour (the Chatham House ...”

“... it emerged out of the British Empire and out of a cosmopolitan economy, after the Second World War.’ And so, he writes, ‘a British nation was created, by which I mean a distinctive economic, political and social unit within the borders of the United Kingdom.’ This unit, and ‘the internal rebuilding of the nation’, required a decisive rejection of ...”

“... he knows intimately the city where Putin began. Vladimir Putin was born in 1952, to working-class parents who had survived the Leningrad siege. Two older brothers had died in the course of it, and Vladimir was a late, solitary child. Although these were still Stalinist times, his mother ensured that he was baptised (he now wears his baptismal cross ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the series of hefty Rutshire Chronicles, delight in the entertainments of rural upper-middle-class life. The point of view always seems to be comfortably located there, admiring the aristocracy, mocking the awkward aspirations of the nouveaux riches, sending children to public schools, riding to hounds, fonder of horses than of reading, dividing the ...”

“... disarray, has often been conducive to the success of right-wing regimes, not least in the inter-war period. And there were not wanting in Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinets perceptive souls who detected in her style of government glimmers of far less savoury right-wing popularists from the recent past. It was Alan Clark (he of the dog called Eva Braun) who drooled ...”