“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... yet oddly so difficult – to argue for the relevance of those conditions to feminism. Austerity, war and climate change have not been prominent concerns in the most visible feminist campaigns, which have focused instead on a relatively narrow set of issues: increasing women’s representation in various spheres, or pursuing legal, policy and cultural changes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in coal was the largest activity of British shipping, a major training ground of seamen for war, and the provider of essential support for the capital: hence regulation and interference. The controls were not only in defiance of the principles of laissez faire but often contradictory, to themselves or to other sections of regulation. Water power and ...”

“... women out of the workplace, at least in the UK and America. In fact, supporting a family in middle-class style increasingly demands two paychecks. The point was to ensure that women carried on with the low and middle jobs and carried on deferring to male authority and entitlement. Part of the Backlash included unpunished physical assaults on women taking jobs ...”