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“... American Samoa, a tiny remnant of old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy in the Pacific, is permitted to send a single member to the House of Representatives in Washington. He is not allowed to vote on the floor of the House – American Samoans are US nationals but not citizens – but thanks to an obscure procedural anomaly he can vote in committee. So it was that on 4 March Samoan Representative Eni Faleomavaega came to cast the deciding vote that passed the House Committee on Foreign Affairs resolution recognising the Armenian genocide ...”

“... I arrived in Thessaloniki at the end of October, one hundred years almost to the day after the Greeks marched in to claim the city, ending centuries of Ottoman rule. I’d been invited to a conference commemorating the centenary but it was the current crisis that was on everyone’s mind. A general strike called to protest against the Eurozone summit had just ended ...”

“... I last flew into Sarajevo on 28 June 1994. The besieged city was momentarily quiet. Forces loyal to Milosevic and Karadzic looked down from the hills, but a demilitarisation agreement was holding firm. On the drive from the airport, I shared a ride with an Austrian journalist, in town because it was 80 years to the day since Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been shot ...”

“... As you speed down the freeway from JFK towards the Manhattan skyline, it is easy to overlook a long, low, neoclassical building that stands by the lake in Flushing Meadow. Built for the 1939 World’s Fair as the New York City Building, it was turned into a wartime ice rink before becoming the first home of the United Nations. The skaters were banished, the decorators cleaned the place up, and in October 1946 President Truman delivered the opening address to the new General Assembly ...”

“... When war came​ to Sarajevo in 1992 almost the only thing about the city known to the aid workers and journalists who made their way there was that it was the place where a Bosnian Serb assassin called Gavrilo Princip had started the First World War. Most had only the haziest notion of who had ruled Bosnia before the 20th century, or what had happened there after the war ended ...”

“... Around noon on 16 August 1943, Dimitri Apostolou, a young Greek peasant, returned to his home village of Komeno in north-west Greece. German troops had just pulled out after a raid lasting some seven hours. In the charred ruins of the houses timbers were still burning. Corpses had begun to swell in the heat. The belly of one woman had been slit open, and a chicken had begun to drag her entrails along the road ...”

“... Live your myth in Greece,’ the Greek National Tourism Office urges us. This summer’s posters feature a young couple, children running along the beach behind them, while an anonymous columned temple hovers implausibly in the Aegean haze. Greece, it seems, has no history except ancient history. In Turkey, too, you can swim in the morning, and climb up to the theatre of ancient Pergamon the same afternoon ...”

“... In​ 1989, the Soviet historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, well known to readers of the LRB, was on a plane when the passenger next to her struck up a conversation. She’d been watching him write a letter in French and on that basis assumed he was French. Given her accent he thought at first that she was Danish. Later it seemed appropriate to her that their first conversation had been about language and labels and the confusion of belonging ...”

“... It was not always easy being a Fascist prophet in interwar Europe. The local electorate seemed deaf to one’s warnings and strangely faithful to old, uncharismatic Conservatives or stolid Labour leaders. Mussolini and Hitler were exhilarating examples of success, but they seemed to scare off as many potential recruits to the cause as they attracted ...”

“... Last October James Rogan, a Republican congressman from California, and manager of the impeachment campaign against Clinton, faced the prospect of a tight re-election battle. His district had been targeted by the Democrats. Crucial to the outcome was the largest concentration of Armenian Americans in the US. To garner their 23,000 votes, Rogan – whose only-ever excursion outside the country was a trip to Armenia – proposed a non-binding Congressional resolution condemning the genocide of 1915 ...”

“... turning to a more obvious area in which to establish German colonial dominance: Eastern Europe. Mark Mazower begins Hitler’s Empire, his sweeping survey of Nazi rule in Europe, with an account of the emergence in late 19th-century Germany and Austria of the idea that the struggle between races for the survival of the fittest required the creation of ...”

“... Mark Mazower has written many elegant but gloomy books about the unending capacity of the Europeans to destroy one another. His new book is elegant, perceptive, stimulating and erudite. It deals with the attempts to create institutions that would bring economic and political order not only to Europe, but to mankind in general, to find a way of bringing to an end the Hobbesian chaos of war between nations with its casual massacres of civilians and organised slaughter on the battlefield ...”

“... combined with creative acts of will to make possible the first step towards a united Europe.’ Mark Mazower’s splendid new book is a kind of anti-Duroselle. It tells ‘a story of narrow squeaks and unexpected twists, not inevitable victories and forward marches’. It argues that each of the three great ideologies competing for the loyalties of ...”

“... the Ottoman Empire and consolidate their own state through European intervention – was fulfilled.Mark Mazower opens his history of the Greek Revolution with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. As Gramsci wrote of Croce, there is a politics of start dates. By choosing 1815, Mazower signals that he wants to incorporate the ...”

“... just as few know that Belarus also saw one of the great military offensives of the war. Citing Mark Mazower, Wilson argues that the Soviet army’s Operation Bagration during the summer of 1944 was the most successful surprise attack in history. It did the German Army as much damage proportionally as the better-known battles of Stalingrad and ...”