Ferdinand Mount

The Ottoman regime allowed the British considerable latitude so long as they didn’t directly threaten Ottoman interests. The British themselves only slowly realised quite how lucky they were in having this vast, quiet buffer state to muffle the rivalries of the great powers. The Treaty of Paris of 1856 was a belated recognition that the Ottoman Empire was worth preserving for just this reason. The treaty not only brought an end to the Crimean War and made the Black Sea a neutral space closed to all warships but also admitted the Ottoman Empire to the Concert of Europe. The terms were no more welcome to Tsar Alexander II than they would have been to Vladimir Putin. All the same, the double shock of the Crimean War and the Indian Rebellion sharpened British anxieties. Clarendon’s thoroughfare became a military highway, with its security threatened on all sides. Paranoia culminated in Gladstone’s military occupation of Egypt in 1882, and the British became de facto rulers of the country – ‘what we all know, but never say’, as Edward Grey put it in 1906.

On​ Christmas Day 1788, the king hid his bedclothes under the bed, put a pillowcase on his head and hugged the pillow, which he called Prince Octavius and said had just been born (Prince Octavius had died five years earlier at the age of four). When George realised what day it was and that he had been kept in his straitjacket and not allowed to go to church, he suddenly went under the sofa,...

‘You  were so generous, you British,’ Hans-Dietrich Genscher, West Germany’s perpetual foreign minister in the 1980s, once remarked: ‘You gave us a decentralised federal structure and a proportional system of election so that never again could we concentrate power at the centre, but you took neither of these for yourselves.’ Canadians and Australians...

‘This is certain – for I have noted it several times – some parts of England are becoming almost as lonesome as the African veld.’ This was Rider Haggard’s conclusion after two years’ gruelling travel across the farming counties of England in 1901 and 1902. Only the odd Irish tinker trudged the dusty roads. Thistles and rushes invaded the untilled...

There was​ always something a little weird about the scene: the heavy lectern hurriedly dragged out into the street from behind the famous front door, as though the premises were suddenly out of action because of flood damage or a bomb threat; on the other side of the road, the hacks and the pap pack awkwardly mustered and jostling for position. And the statement itself, all too obviously...