“... posture from which he would have liked to address the Arab Spring, and for that matter the civil war in Syria, if only Assad had obeyed when Obama said he must go. Obama has a larger-spirited wish to help people than any of his predecessors since Jimmy Carter; though caution bordering on timidity has kept him from speaking with Carter even once in the last ...”

“... Preliminary sketches for the great canvas of the Cold War were already under way in the Balkans in the summer of 1944 when Frank Thompson was executed. Bulgaria was a member of the Axis and Frank, older brother of the historian E.P. Thompson, was on a mission in the country for Special Operations Executive: the idea was that anti-Nazi partisans should be encouraged and supported in their efforts to stir up trouble, as their neighbours the Yugoslav partisans were doing, and keep German units too busy to deploy elsewhere ...”

“... was to correct social injustices by persuading ordinary citizens – not least, educated middle-class voters like themselves – to insist on redistributive interventions by their government. In the same spirit, Rorty thinks US leftists of the Sixties and Seventies ought to have harnessed the energies of the Civil Rights movement to build a welfare system ...”

“... before in his own life and the world events he had lived through, particularly the First World War. Freeman characterises it as ‘the great adventure’ of his life but the reader may disagree, having been so entertainingly and expertly led through the many other adventures that occupy the first two-thirds of the book. Perhaps Ede’s was not thought to ...”

“... had a relatively better place, and freedom of activity prefiguring their part in this century’s war of liberation. Trung Trac in the first century AD was a Vietnamese Joan of Arc, the most celebrated of a bevy of heroines of the conflicts with China; She is pictured on horseback, like Joan, a sword in each hand. Here, too, one may conjecture that the ...”

“... certainly was. At a slightly deeper level the election results reflect the breakdown of the Cold War structure of US domestic politics – exactly the same kind of breakdown that has been manifest in a far more obvious form in both Europe and Japan. In theory, this should not be happening. After all, in the United States there was no significant Communist or ...”

“... out her theory of totalitarianism, dutifully extending it, as her followers did during the Cold War, to America’s enemies: al-Qaida, Saddam, Iran. Arendt’s academic chorus continues to swell, sounding the most elusive notes of her least political texts while ignoring her prescient remarks about Zionism and imperialism. Academic careers are built on ...”

“... defending Aldous Huxley, who was brought in to Eton as a temporary master during the First World War when qualified teachers were scarce. By then nearly blind, Huxley was tormented by the boys until Blair intervened. It is, as Dinshaw remarks, ‘a neat image: the prophet of Brave New World shielded by the creator of 1984 – perhaps a little too ...”

“... back onto ourselves. When Gloria Goltz, the title character of Atticus Lish’s second novel, The War for Gloria, in her early forties, clever, unfulfilled and the mother of a teenager, is diagnosed with the degenerative illness ALS, her life shrinks. Meanwhile her son Corey, who is fifteen when she is diagnosed, both acts as her primary caregiver and rebels ...”

“... Not only is this a virtually Panglossian account of the colonial revolution, the Civil War and Reconstruction, to say nothing of the debates over mass immigration, Prohibition, civil rights and foreign wars. It is a positively apocalyptic reading of the Sixties. As with theories of the collapse of Rome, you can tell a good deal about somebody from ...”

“... Britain has fought the Americans twice. The first occasion we know about: it was the war that secured the colonists’ independence (1775-83). Mark Urban’s book is about the experiences of one British regiment – the Royal Welch Fusiliers – in that campaign. (Most of them weren’t Welsh, incidentally.) The second war scarcely anyone in Britain has heard of, and even Americans seem to be hazy about it ...”

“... resumes in the nude. People learn they must take better care of their bodies and become healthier. Class distinctions, once marked by outward trappings, vanish. As the police are no longer recognisable, everyone polices themselves and there is no longer crime. Somerville and his fiancée decide to live together without marriage; the arts flourish; and the ...”

“... determined by some generic effluvium of Mann, a compound of his Magic (Swiss) Mountain, his post-war return to Switzerland and, perhaps, his rather landlocked position at the centre of European letters. But the Dybbuk that seems to have taken over Mr Greene’s imagination is specific: German Mann, pre-...”

“... Currency Commission, and was taken into the Treasury as an Economic Adviser at the outbreak of war in 1914. He wrote and lectured copiously on the theory of money, and soon acquired a reputation for audaciousness and outstanding clarity. Yet there is little evidence to support the claim often made that, even before 1914, Keynes was already showing symptoms ...”

“... perhaps 40,000 Iraqi civilians. And more than 70 journalists, outnumbering the 69 killed in World War Two, the 63 in Vietnam and the 17 in Korea. The risks involved mean that it is hard to ask whether journalists do a good enough job in telling us what we need to know. Stories are not driven by content alone, but by the way in which they are formulated and ...”