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“... discomfort. Born in Bucharest, Weber was sent to school in England, served in the Second World War as a captain in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and in the course of his service spent the mid-1940s in India, after earlier stints in Belgium and Germany. Demobilised in 1947, he went to Cambridge, and devoted the rest of his life to history, mostly ...”

“... despite their omnipresence in the landscape. For much of the Golden Age, the Dutch were at war, but very little violence ever made it into their pictures, though soldiers are shown in guardrooms and brothels, as well as domestic settings. In domestic scenes, perhaps the most conspicuous absence is the man of the house, who is often signified by a ...”

“... back into the night. The countryside became caught up in a bitter and increasingly vicious war, of which he was the leading orchestrator on the Irish side. On the evening before Guy Fawkes in 1920, 11 lorry-loads of British troops entered Granard, sacking the town and burning the Greville Arms to the ground, in retaliation for the shooting dead of a ...”

“... when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century.’ It is, perhaps, a curious notion that there could be any time when it would be ‘a good thing’ for a country to experience a racking political scandal which, over a 12-year period, led to the ...”

“... organiser of the October seizure of power, charismatic leader of the Red Army during the Civil War – seemed a man for the ages, one of the great figures of the 20th century. Trotsky’s vilification by Stalin was part of the epic. It started in the 1920s with a succession struggle in which Trotsky, the most famous man in Russia after Lenin, was one major ...”

“... is found, for example, in the Histories of the Greek Polybius, writing about the Punic Mercenary War, in which the Roman and Carthaginian camps are contrasted with the rabble of mercenary troops, undisciplined, multilingual, and (such imputations often go together) capable of cannibal atrocities. (Polybius was a historical source of Flaubert’s ...”

“... and cool in a crisis; in 1948 Lie made him deputy in a two-man team charged with mediating the war being fought for control of Palestine. A few months into the posting, Bunche missed a travel connection and so wasn’t in the car next to his partner (and third Scandinavian), the Swedish former Red Cross official Count Folke Bernadotte, when it was ambushed ...”

“... discuss public figures with assuredness: he saw Chamberlain as ‘a statesman quite in the second class; an engineer, not an architect – full of small ingenuity and cleverness, but quite unable to take a synoptic view of things; he has never really emerged from Birmingham and the tin-tacks that made him.’ Such a style makes a deeply-felt religious ...”

“... and abstract.His summa is F-111 (1964-65), a history painting of the US during the Vietnam War. Named after a fighter jet developed at colossal expense, this immense (86-foot long) painting surrounds the viewer with its dark dreams. Along the body of the jet Rosenquist introduces images: wallpaper, a tyre, a cake, a light bulb, an umbrella, an atomic ...”

“... and Melton Prior (1845-1910), who brought home trophies and weapons from the places he visited as war correspondent for the Illustrated London News. But many of the masks, totems and costumes found their original use in ceremonies and festivals which, one realises looking at them here, are not so very far from pier-end entertainments. The Museum stands as ...”

“... book with a face that has been through the mill. She was born in 1906, in comfortable middle-class circumstances in North Germany, and was raised in Königsberg, the Prussian Edinburgh (or perhaps, more accurately, Aberdeen). Her father, an engineer, died, after a painful and lengthy illness, when she was a little girl. Inflation, after the First World ...”

“... wife’s death in 1907, and particularly in his years of Siberian exile during the First World War, he turns out to have had many lovers – fellow revolutionaries, wives of fellow revolutionaries, landladies – but the relationships broke up without difficulty when he moved, and he rarely kept in touch, even when children were born. Women are a new topic ...”

“... offer of Marshall Aid; Europe was divided, east and west; and the seven surviving major Nazi war criminals who had been tried and condemned by the victorious allies at Nuremberg were moved, the subject of a special four-power agreement, into Spandau Prison in what was to become West Berlin. Guarded turn and turn about by platoons of ...”

“... you’ve never heard of John Chilembwe,or of his mission church at MbombweHQ for his First War Risingfirst salvo for the Malawi nation.Yet as surely as my mother livedon the tracer-path planetleft behind in our world’s world lineso surely my memory discovers hernot in chemical coding but alive there stilland so surely John Chilembwe still gives ...”

“... as a British army officer – and was sent back aged eleven to an England still shaped by the war, for a boarding school education at the hands of teachers who had experienced ‘service’: ‘The world war remained a presence, a shadow, but also a light, the source of virtue and meaning.’ The headmaster is a ...”