“... to them and received, on the whole, an excellent academic education. Although primarily middle-class institutions, a significant number of working-class children also attended them. For some this meant cultural liberation and social advance; for others merely social alienation. Even by this point, however, there was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... four books of the New Testament’, but who was, unlike many of the other early activists, working-class. Gordon Brown used to joke that in those early days, ‘we promised home rule, proportional representation and the prohibition of alcohol. And in more than seventy years we have managed to secure none of them.’ In 1894, the Scottish Labour Party ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of those are there in the world? He wrote his DPhil on how to protect children more effectively in war zones; he’d wanted to serve because he loved his country enough to risk dying for it: I walked into the rotunda at Rhodes House – a fancy mansion on the Oxford campus – and looked up at the names etched into the marble. Those were the names of scholars ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri and the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon), 2006 (Israel’s war on Lebanon), 2008 (internal fighting in Lebanon) ‘prevented us from having the freedom to reform’. I asked them if security forces had shot at unarmed demonstrators. They all said no and insisted that the regime had prohibited the use of weapons against ...”

“... The Power Elite, The Organisation Man, The Feminine Mystique and The Making of the English Working Class – you’ll find they depict a world moving towards an almost claustrophobic cohesion. Classes consolidate, whites push down on blacks, blue collars are hemmed in by white collars, and grey flannel suits march down city streets lined with offices and ...”

“... of a works manager, he left school at fifteen and joined the Royal Artillery for the Second World War, before returning to school and then taking a BA and PhD at the LSE. He then taught at the University of Leicester for the rest of his (too short) life. ‘Energetic, enthusiastic, intellectually receptive, sociable, and ever on the watch for new ...”

“... site for a good deal of what was nonetheless more accurately described as the Bosnian ‘village war’. ETA is notoriously active and supported in the industrial suburbs of Bilbao and San Sebastian, as well as in the Basque mountain heartland. Belfast has undeniably been the focus of much of the Ulster conflict, and there has been forced segregation of the ...”

“... one of Popper’s last appearances in public. He shared his recollections of the outbreak of World War One: it had ruined his school holidays. This was an inheritance light-years away from that of the millennium’s righteous-cause addicts. Whatever the verdict on his open society, no serious analysis could confuse it with the open market religion of the 1980s ...”