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“... an expansion of the American airforce base at Vicenza that had been a launching-pad for the Balkan War; dispatched forces to Lebanon as a glacis for Israel; and retroactively covered up kidnapping and rendition by the CIA from Italian soil. None of this did anything for the popularity of Prodi or his ministers. Increased fiscal pressure angered the traditional ...”

“... when he attacked the manipulation of racial hostilities to divide the black and white working class. No one running for high office in America had done that since the 1890s. But once in power, Obama soon abandoned any pretence of promoting social democracy. After pushing through a stimulus package, he quickly (and illogically) embraced the gospel of ...”

“... and star turn on the baseball team at Yale and the stint as a fighter pilot in the Second World War. His crash in the Pacific brought him dangerously close to being captured by the Japanese, who, like Jr’s administration, practised torture – the charge of cannibalism is added to show there’s a difference. From there Dad’s exploits tend to mix ...”

“... was a political justification for what, from a legal perspective, were ordinary acts of war. The positivist international law of the 19th century rejected natural law distinctions between just and unjust wars. Military aggression was unregulated and conquest gave good title to territory, as demonstrated by the British acquisition of the Falklands in ...”

“... to early modern rulers: dynastic marriages, the exchange of territory, diplomatic alliances and war – especially war. Beginning in 1640, five consecutive Hohenzollerns left behind a state larger than the one they inherited. Prussia became a new power in Europe, even if it remained the least of the great powers through ...”

“... Some drooping memories of Cambridge before the war have been revived of late by various writings. One is an autobiography, Reading from Left to Right, by a Canadian, Professor H.S. Ferns.1 Few socialists of the Marxist persuasion – practically the only sort of people I got to know at college – seem to write memoirs; most of them probably feel that there are always more useful things to be done ...”

“... raises the question Yalom wants answered – ‘who owns the breast?’ Anxiety to keep the upper-class woman’s bust in its perfection, as well to maintain her health, supported the employment of wet-nurses during the lifetimes of Richardson and Rousseau. This often involved the dismissal of the infant from the family home – Jane Austen’s mother, for ...”

“... English doing as well as the Czechs or the Dutch? My answer begins from the special hold here of class on culture. The culture of art in England is genteel. It is tied to Home Counties, late-imperial class values and attitudes in ways – with a depth and tightness of affiliation – that mark it out from Turin or St ...”

“... better than the present lot – Sampras, Agassi, Moya, Kafelnikov, Rios and so on. The only first-class pre-World War Two player I ever saw was Henri Cochet, who had occasionally beaten the great Tilden in the Twenties. A skinny, muscular Frenchman in very short shorts, Cochet played in the first Cairo tournament I attended ...”

“... over new international responsibilities from the exhausted European empires after the Second World War. Kennan lost his influence inside the Beltway in the mid-1950s, after he began exhorting Americans to pursue ‘self-perfection’ and ‘spiritual distinction’ instead of exporting freedom and democracy to the rest of the world. But for the innumerable ...”

“... days of the German Communist Party: a foot-soldier in the German opposition to the First World War; a mute, almost faceless presence, waiting outside prisons or bent over a typewriter, banging out the anti-war ‘Letters from Spartakus’. The year after Luxemburg’s death, staying at the house of Luxemburg’s great ...”

“... War,’ said an old peacenik poster with the words scrawled across a child’s drawing of a tree, ‘is harmful to children and other living things.’ This subtle and sophisticated book has a little of that same power to shock by innocence. It is about how children think of living things, less a matter of what they learn than of what human nature teaches about nature ...”

“... its ranches: Edie was born there, in Santa Barbara. Fuzzy had failed to pass the medical test for war service, something that hurt him deeply: it is not being glib or sensational to say that the absence of a war abroad seems to have driven him to stage a war elsewhere. He brought it all ...”

“... women the vote (compared to 12.9 million men) but excluded precisely those young women whose war work politicians were citing as the reason for their conversion to the cause. No one really pretends that this silly compromise, or even the 1918 election at which women first cast their votes, is the true focus of current interest. Neither of the books ...”

“... Apart from the Times, whose threepenny price marked it as the newspaper of record for the ruling class, London had a clutch of what were conveniently known as penny papers. On one side were the Tory Morning Post, Daily Telegraph and Standard, on the other, the Liberal Daily News and Daily Chronicle, surviving or even thriving on circulations well under ...”