“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wouldn’t have nothing to do with them.’ Miss Hearne, deeply alert to nuances of education and class, thinks to herself that he can’t be very well educated if he can speak like that. And then she replies: ‘O, that’s not like Ireland, Mr Madden. Why, the men are gods here, I honestly do believe.’ As Mr Madden continues, Miss Hearne becomes aware of ...”

“... Between the end of World War One and the Great Depression there occurred in Harlem such a flowering of music, dance, theatre and painting as to change white American perceptions of African American artistic expression. In a little over a decade, more books by black Americans appeared in print than had been published in the entire history of black American writing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the neighbouring colonies of Kenya and Tanganyika (which was German until after the First World War), Uganda had a ‘native’ elite, whom the British administration had handsomely rewarded for their role alongside colonial forces in enlarging the protectorate. Buganda itself was an expansionist state, with a standing army and civil administration. As it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The presidency meanwhile has been stripped of many of its powers, including the power to declare war. This wasn’t a military coup, as some claimed: the coup had already taken place on 11 February 2011, when the SCAF took control and the revolutionaries agreed to give it a chance, a decision many came to regret. But this ‘judicial coup’, as some had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the former. Who bothers, while teaching The Portrait of a Lady for the nth time, to explain to a class that it is a beautiful book? But it would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that, for most writers, greedy to learn and emulate, this is the only important question. Randall Stevenson’s volume in the Oxford English Literary History, which provides an ...”