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“... although many distinguished studies of the subject have appeared since (by historians such as Paul Preston, Raymond Carr and Martin Blinkhorn, to mention three British examples). My memories of Homage to Catalonia were not only of the fine, evocative writing, perhaps Orwell’s best, but of his enthusiasm for the people with whom he had lived and ...”

“... permanent in jury to my spirit from which I would never entirely recover.’ One has to turn to Paul Preston’s new book to learn that Gurney was a sculptor and that he himself got an injury which prevented his ever sculpting again. ‘Women Writing Spain’ is the modish slogan-title to a chapter which signally fails to deliver its promised ...”

“... and Hitler, whose world-shaking career of war, genocide and destruction lasted a mere 12 years. Paul Preston’s massive biography, on which he has worked for many years, is not, he writes in his Prologue, ‘a history a 20th-century Spain nor an analysis of every aspect of the dictatorship, but rather a close study of the man’. Franco was born and ...”

“... idiot. Casado, who pulled him into the conspiracy, was the self-dramatising, self-obsessed moron. Paul Preston, author of The Last Days of the Spanish Republic, hits hard from his first page. ‘This is the story of an avoidable humanitarian tragedy that cost many thousands of lives and ruined tens of thousands more.’ He explains that the tragedy ...”

“... too, were less like Republican orphans once their cause had been adopted by foreign journalists. Paul Preston catches this column-inch internationalism very well in his magnificent survey of the correspondents who worked in Spain, their minders in the Republic’s press offices, and the crew of dons and bullies who controlled the information flow on ...”

“... once called A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War – it’s no longer said to be concise – Paul Preston points out that this prelude to the Second World War has generated as many books as the Second World War itself. During the Cold War, with the CIA busy collaborating with anarchists and Trotskyists to try to obscure ‘the fact that ...”

“... from writing the local newspaper’s ‘on this day in history’ column. In The Spanish Holocaust Paul Preston quotes the socialist Juan-Simeón Vidarte’s contemporary description of the repression that followed the October 1934 uprising in Las Cuencas. In Sama de Langreo, Franco’s soldiers took 27 workers from the jail to be executed without ...”

“... for Defence Procurement, in January 1994. It was put to the then editor of the Guardian, Peter Preston. The words ‘we all’ referred to Aitken himself, his wife Lolicia and his faithful Arab friend Said Ayas. The answer to the question was ‘yes’. They were all bare-faced liars, but none more so than the debonair minister himself. Why did he ...”

“... never on time for anything in her life’. She is beyond indignant when her banker fiancé, Preston Dillard (Henry Fonda), stays at a business meeting rather than pick her up as he was supposed to. She decides to punish him by embarrassing him. She will wear a red dress to a ball where all young ladies are supposed to wear white. Dillard, stubborn in ...”

“... they took the town of Brunete they would gain control of the road west of the city. According to Paul Preston, however, Brunete was a ‘strategic irrelevance’, and the battle merely gave Franco the opportunity to kill a large number of Republicans using the Messerschmitts he had just acquired. On 18 July a bomb from one of those planes hit the olive ...”

“... down Britain like Armada beacons. Brixton resembled post-Blitz London. Whole areas of Manchester, Preston, Wolverhampton and Hull were reduced to rubble and glass. In July, Liverpool lit up in a haze of flame and CS gas. Shortly afterwards Manchester erupted once again. The Home Secretary at the time was William Whitelaw. He did what politicians tend to do in ...”

“... electorate anything like a choice had come about by chance in a handful of places, such as Preston and Westminster. Naturally, most of the men who became MPs regarded this system as the best and fairest in the world. Equally naturally, most of the people who didn’t have a vote wanted to have some say in their government, and occasionally were moved ...”

“... Sometimes he was Smith, sometimes he was Stewart, and sometimes he was Preston, but the most telling of the aliases Charles Stewart Parnell used to conduct the liaison with Mrs O’shea that eventually destroyed him was undoubtedly ‘Mr Fox’. Revealed by the divorce proceedings of November 1890, which, in wrecking his alliance with Gladstonian Liberalism, cost him his leadership of the Irish Parliamentary party, it rebounded savagely on him in the last, desperate convulsions of his career, as he struggled in a punishing series of by-elections to recover the dominance of the Irish national cause which had been his unchallenged possession for over a decade ...”

“... returned to Washington in the summer of 2003 – having been sacked by Rumsfeld and replaced with Paul Bremer – he was taken to the White House. Informed by Rumsfeld that Bush had ordered his ousting, he was now going to be thanked by the president for his work. It had not been easy; he’d been constantly overruled by the Pentagon; he had been denied ...”

“... discredit Lawrence’s advocacy of sexual polarity. Balbert catches them quoting out of context: Paul Morel’s patronising view of the suffrage movement is not Lawrence’s, but part of a dialogue with Clara Dawes which will eventually reveal Clara’s emotional failure; Miriam Leivers’s polemic against sexual inequality reveals her lack of ‘healthy ...”