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“... of Spanish flu was recorded on 4 March 1918, when a military mess cook called Albert Gitchell in Camp Funston, Kansas, reported sick with a headache and fever. By the following day a hundred others had reported the same symptoms. A hangar was requisitioned to house the men, but flu has an incubation period of a couple of days, and had already moved on, aided ...”

“... as centurion in four Roman legions, rose to the rank of primus pilus in Legion V (Macedonica), was camp prefect for Legion VI (Victrix), was put in charge of the fleet at Misenum in southern Italy, and became procurator of Liburnia, where his inscriptions are: all of which seems a long way from Britain. But Legion VI was based at York and Roman soldiers moved ...”

“... the Balkans. (The status of the FAU being incomprehensible to his captors, Burns was in a POW camp for 733 days. When he was finally repatriated, his health was too poor for him to return to frontline service.) Ridgway served as an ambulance driver in Syria, Lebanon and Italy, as the Allies pushed the Wehrmacht up the boot. Not until the war was ...”

“... In​ 1955, William Strath was asked to produce a report for the government on the possible impact of nuclear conflict on the UK. Strath, a former tax inspector, economic planner and experienced civil servant, came to the conclusion that Britain was unlikely to emerge from a nuclear attack as a functioning society, never mind as a nation able to wage war ...”

“... returned to Florence. In December 1944, Guido was arrested by the British and sent to a prison camp near Terni. I haven’t been able to determine what the exact charges against him were. Released in July 1945, he began to rebuild his career, apparently without too much trouble. In 1947 he became the director of the Conservatory of Bologna, and in 1950 was ...”

“... caution to the wind, and it is the Mendelians whom Radick has in his sights, first and foremost William Bateson (1861-1926) of Cambridge. The bulk of the book is given over to the controversy that raged between Bateson and W.F.R. Weldon (1860-1906) of University College London and later Oxford, and between their allies, over the interpretation and ...”

“... just seen his former lover, Hanna Schmitz, convicted of war crimes: she had been a concentration camp guard, something he hadn’t known when she seduced him as a 15-year-old boy. None of the roles he saw played out in court appeals to him: ‘Prosecution seemed to me as grotesque a simplification as defence, and judging was the most grotesque ...”

“... that there were 3200 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, 700 more than its capacity. I heard Major General William Brandenburg, who oversees US military detention operations in Iraq, say: ‘We’ve got a normal capacity and a surge capacity. We’re operating at surge capacity.’ A year before, I had heard the President promise ‘to demolish the Abu Ghraib ...”

“... your coffee’. Anyone fortunate enough to be spared liquidation or internment in a concentration camp would become, ‘as so many already have, 20th-century slaves’. Hoover knew this sounded incredible, but ‘it took only 23 men to overthrow Russia,’ and he had it on good authority that, ‘after the actual seizure of power’, a revolution in the US ...”

“... Gallery tells me that Breakspears was once the childhood home of Elizabeth Stephen, the bride of William Hallett, who together constitute Gainsborough’s Morning Walk, and that Reynolds’s Captain Tarleton used to hang in the house. Captain Tarleton is one of the paintings (another being Millais’s Lorenzo and Isabella) which would figure in a dream ...”

“... to support a guild and School of Handicraft in the East End is recorded in Ashbee’s diary: ‘William Morris and a great deal of cold water ... he says it is useless, that I am going to do a thing with no basis to do it on ... “Look I am going to forge a weapon for you; and thus I too work with you in the overthrow of Society.” To which he ...”

“... and stewing; they are sweating all over; they are absolutely pining and dying for a Plot!’ So William Cobbett wrote to Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt in 1816. He did not exaggerate. The verb ‘foment’ might have been invented to describe the activities of Lords Sidmouth and Castlereagh and their spymasters in Bow Street during the turbulent 1810s. Seldom in ...”

“... who had suffered far more got proportionally much less. My colleague Paula Fass, the child of camp survivors, has written about discovering her ghost family, the families her mother and father lost before they met in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany and started anew. These were the families of which they would not ...”

“... and Protestants, further complicated by strife among different kinds of True Believer in each camp, provided the context for these wars. There was a 12-year truce between 1609 and 1621, even though battle continued at sea; war on land resumed between 1621 and 1648, and fighting at sea continued after that – but the Dutch Navy and its painters and ...”

“... What is peculiar to Górecki, and what appears to alarm the faint-hearted in the Modernist camp no less than the admirers of (say) Tavener or Arvo Pärt, is his spectacular independence from market considerations of any sort. Fact and fiction can safely take the same country road towards the wooden cabin near the Tatra Mountains where the penurious and ...”