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“... In 1957, Louisette Ighilahriz, a member of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria, was captured by French paratroopers. She was tortured and repeatedly raped. Until a French Army doctor arranged for her to be transferred to hospital and then to prison, her only hope was that her guards might be careless enough to leave her with the means of killing herself ...”

“... One Monday morning in September 1940, Raymond Aron was lying in bed at a camp for Free French soldiers in Aldershot. His roommate, who had arrived the previous afternoon, asked him the time and, when told, replied: ‘Déjà sept heures moins vingt.’ Aron left the room. When he returned, his companion had shot himself. The inquest was unable to establish any motive for the suicide and Aron never found out who his roommate had been ...”

“... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had ...”

“... and spires of the university city flash past, so near and yet so remote. Until the publication of Richard Vinen’s superb history, the best accounts of National Service were fictional: David Lodge’s Ginger, You’re Barmy is a particularly successful evocation of the miseries and absurdities of the conscript’s life.* But ...”