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“... into the bush. (The Zimbabwean handshake: hands, thumbs, then hands again.) What did you do in the war, Daddy? Tell us, what was it like? It seems so long ago. Zimbabwe has just celebrated the third anniversary of its independence. Comrade Robert Mugabe rules. Ministers have been fired, reinstated, shuffled sideways. The British have made an integrated ...”

“... what they perhaps did not: that there is a way to reverse the catastrophic effects of even this class of nerve agents, effects which – because they cause a loss of muscle function – can include uncontrollable vomiting, diarrhoea, convulsions, paralysis, respiratory failure and cardiac arrest. At Salisbury District Hospital, the Skripals would have been ...”

“... were still battling white minority rule, and the struggle was becoming more intense as the Cold War drew on. The Soviet Union and the US both had a role in the making and unmaking of Africa’s independence movements, from the relative success of decolonisation in Ghana through the disaster of the Belgian Congo to the costly ...”

“... the Third Programme. It probably couldn’t have happened at any time except when it did. The war seemed to have shown that the public for music and books and culture generally had been thrillingly enlarged. The Forces had developed a keen appetite for education, cultural and civic, some of it pretty subversive, for the service vote is known to have had a ...”

“... courageous reporters, and Russia its most principled voice of opposition to Putin and the ongoing war in Chechnya. Between 1999 and her death, Politkovskaya filed more than 500 pieces for the liberal paper Novaya gazeta. The vast majority focused on the horrors unfolding in the North Caucasus, bringing them to the attention of a public that was otherwise ...”

“... Leninism’ at the New Left Review. He didn’t believe that theories based on the primacy of class and capital could account for the rise of the feminist movement or deal with its concerns, or that Marxism had much to offer environmentalists or human rights activists. The time he spent in Frankfurt during the Baader-Meinhof Group’s attempt to bring ...”

“... the Americans when there was almost universal sympathy for them is one thing: arranging them for a war against Iraq is quite another. Were he merely a talented international fixer this gift for negotiating would be largely unproblematical, but he also brings to negotiating strong emotional, moralising impulses. And this, I think, is the second reason why he ...”

“... as he often did, with punishing self-doubt. His wife, Francine Faure, who had spent the war in Algiers, had rejoined him in Paris and given birth to twins, but their reunion had cost him his greatest love, the Spanish actress María Casares. He and Casares, the daughter of left-wing Spanish exiles, had been inseparable since they’d met in March ...”

“... shouting ‘Vive la Pologne!’ when charging with the bayonet – on the grounds that this was a war declared on behalf of Poland. The sergeant failed to convince him that he was sowing moral confusion in a rank of conscripts shouting ‘Vive la France!’, and the first of his incarcerations took place. After the Armistice, he joined the collaborationist ...”

“... in three distinct waves. The first generation came to maturity in the palmy days before the Great War, when the empires were assuming their final consolidated form, and colonialism seemed unchallengeable: in the long decade of 1872-84 were born Marcel Mauss (1872), Alfred Kroeber (1876), A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881), and Bronislaw Malinowski (1884), with Ruth ...”

“... Yuri Slezkine​ , a master stylist as well as a first-class historian, is the least predictable of scholars. Still, it comes as a surprise to find that the book he has now produced, after long gestation, is a Soviet War and Peace. True, Slezkine says he is writing history, whereas Tolstoy’s War and Peace is generally treated, if somewhat gingerly, as a novel; and Slezkine’s subject is not so much war and peace as that curious state between the two that existed in the Soviet Union from the October Revolution of 1917 to the Second World War ...”

“... Hertfordshire and Claud was sent to school at Berkhamstead. The headmaster during the First World War was Charles Greene, father of Graham and a high-minded radical, and Cockburn first saw political violence on Armistice Day, when a drunken mob burst into the school accusing Greene (quite wrongly) of having been ‘anti-...”

“... and Gallipoli. Their ultimate object was to knock Germany’s ally Turkey out of the Great War. The operation was conducted in two phases. First, an attempt was made to rush a naval force through the Dardanelles to bombard or overawe Constantinople. Then a campaign was launched to seize the Gallipoli Peninsula in order to facilitate the progress of the ...”

“... meant to this country’. He thought she would be responsible for bringing America into the war.Just a few years before, Thompson had been most famous for her marriage to Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and for what her friends referred to as her ‘comico-terrible gaffe’. In 1931, when the Nazi Party was on ...”

“... There​ can scarcely be a subject about which more books have been written than the Second World War, and yet surprisingly few of them risk a synthesis of the whole. Many writers refer to the war in their titles, but their subjects are usually only a part of the whole: a campaign, a geographical area, a single country or, very often, a single armed service ...”