“... married women gained legal personality only in 1938 and it took the trauma of the Second World War to usher in women’s suffrage in 1944.Historians have puzzled over the reticence of democratic France – one of the earliest adopters of universal male suffrage in 1848 – to grant equal rights to women. In Only Paradoxes to Offer (1996), Joan Wallach ...”

“... How does a novelist write about World War Two or the war in Vietnam? About populations deliberately enslaved or exterminated, destruction seen as normal? American writers differ from British novelists in approaching such all-embracing violence as too grotesque to be viewed in any terms except those of fantasy ...”

“... of France, Finland, Czechoslovakia and (until 1933) Germany. Anti-Fascism and the Second World War gave most European Communist Parties a second chance (Germany is an obvious exception), bringing them to the peak of their influence and indeed, from 1945 to 1947, of their participation in government. In France and Italy they even replaced the socialists as ...”

“... or political opponents; above all always remember that, as the saying goes, ‘business is war’. During the course of the novel Crichton delivers a few critical swipes at America, whose terminal decline is best illustrated, as one typically well-informed character explains, by the fact that it now has 4 per cent of the world population, but 50 per ...”

“... easily. Andrew Sinclair helps to cut the moles down to size. The real intellectual élite in inter-war Cambridge, he reminds us, were not the moles or their contemporaries (mostly from the arts faculties) in the Apostles but the brilliant scientists at the Cavendish Laboratory. Even the Kremlin, Sinclair argues, learned more from Cambridge physicists than from ...”

“... used retroactive decrees to execute criminals already serving time – all under the guise of a ‘war against indiscipline’. Soldiers flogged men and women for failing to use passenger bridges over highways or failing to form orderly queues at bus stops. Nonetheless, he enjoyed a reputation for probity. He considered his regime a necessary ...”

“... other stories. One thing I did know was that the Nazis had been responsible for the Second World War, and that they were a very bad lot. What could have led William to become a Nazi, however briefly?‘William and the Nasties’ is a clumsy attempt to satirise the rise of Nazism. Greedy self-interest is what motivates the Outlaws, together with the belief ...”

“... The P stands for provisional but the rest of the acronym is mysterious. WO could perhaps be ‘War Office’ except the unit isn’t part of the army, reporting instead to the Cabinet Office. The element of trivial mystery, and the awkwardness of the extra O and the brackets, are rather the point, a satirical dig at the bureaucratic obscurantism that ...”

“... that he is the most consistently brilliant of all the film-makers who have emerged from post-war Poland. Andrzej Wajda is a greater genius, but even he does not have Polanski’s unerring talent for visual showmanship. Polanski is a child of the streets, who learned before his voice broke that it was a choice between hustling and dying. He was born in a ...”

“... in normal economic activity, they proved altogether too successful in the competition for middle-class and lower-middle-class occupations. Ancient superstitions survived all over Europe, too, so that it was not until the abolition of the Papal States after the reunification of Italy that Italian Jews were free from the ...”

“... attention. So he strove to analogise, to turn what he called the ‘deadly ecological war against the Ogoni’ into a struggle emblematic of our times. His writing thus lays the ground for a broader estimation of the human cost of the romance between unanswerable corporations and unspeakable regimes. Saro-Wiwa’s political realism was tempered by ...”

“... Stein and Mabel Dodge, and had affairs with Marinetti and Papini. She spent the First World War in New York as part of Walter Arensberg’s circle, which included Duchamp, Picabia, Varèse, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. She sketched Freud in Vienna and lived among the avant garde in postwar Berlin. In the Twenties, when American expatriates ...”

“... to a head in the spring of 1917. First the United States vaulted onto the world stage by declaring war on Germany. Then, in the autumn, the successful Bolshevik coup inaugurated a challenger regime that would remain in contention for more than seventy years. With America’s entry into the war effectively guaranteeing the ...”

“... the political was a social fantasy, constructed not just to maintain order, but also to enforce class rule. This meant it was historically contingent and could be challenged. But, Robinson claimed, radical movements such as European anarchism were too attached to the idea to do so. Resistance must come from elsewhere. The expansion of the political to the ...”

“... empty shop-shelves, montages of violent action from Cuban history and the Spanish Civil War (including Robert Capa’s famous photo of a dying soldier). The base at Guantánamo Bay opens, or rather encloses itself. Sergio is confused. ‘Everything is the same,’ he says, looking around him. And then: ‘I have changed, and the city has ...”