“... gospel of the abbé Barruel and Joseph de Maistre, to which reactionary Catholics and many others held fast throughout the 19th and much of the 20th centuries. For two hundred years, these popular images of the Enlightenment have retained considerable force. Textbooks (including Colin Jones’s superb new one) have repeated them to new generations of ...”

“... logic of manhood which taught that, once slighted, that slight must be avenged, if one is to be held to be a man’. Fletcher’s Richard II is, therefore, very different from the Richard II of previous historians. In place of an individual set apart from his nobles by both antipathy to war and absolutist notions of royal authority, notions proclaimed in ...”

“... When Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared in 1950, many of the ingredients it called for were unobtainable. But even after meat came off the ration, few people can have had much practical need for a traditional Turkish recipe for stuffing a whole sheep. That was not the point. Saturated with description, of figs and aubergines, of fishing boats at anchor in Marseille and paella pans left out to dry in Spanish courtyards, Mediterranean Food brought a beakerful of the warm South to chilly, postwar England ...”

“... up with the space of drifting. The chair in the attic is up to no good. Then you took me and held me like I was a child or a prize. For a moment there I thought I knew you, but you backed away, wiping your specs, ‘Oh, excuse ...’ It’s okay, will come another time when stupendous seabirds are carilloning out over the Atlantic, when the charging fire ...”

“... doubts about the German national character, which became the subject of a notorious seminar she held at Chequers with a group of historians to discuss what German reunification might mean for the rest of Europe. A note of the occasion made by Powell, which was subsequently leaked, listed some of the attributes that were considered: ‘Their insensitivity to ...”

“... found out my mother was going to marry my father, she asked my mother to reconsider. ‘What about David?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to marry David instead?’ David is my father’s brother. He still lives alone in the council house my grandmother died in. He used to hear ...”

“... undressed and hung his clothes askew on the silent butler. When he took off his underpants, he held them in his hands a moment, expecting his wife to look towards him naked. She didn’t. About to throw his underpants on the floor, where his socks were, he noted, on the inside of the crotch, a yellow stain. He thought: Oh, Christ. He reached down for his ...”

“... banned groups advocating for an Islamic caliphate in the country.In his new book, Revolusi, David Van Reybrouck puts the creation of the republic at the centre of the story. Indonesia was the first country to declare independence in the wake of the Second World War, shortly after the surrender of Japan, which had occupied what was then known as the ...”

“... facts presented in his account, and in those of pioneering media critics such as Liz Curtis and David Miller, suggest that a more critical verdict would not be out of place.* The early years of broadcasting in Northern Ireland had been safe and somnolent, as Savage describes. After BBC Northern Ireland was established between the wars, its directors quickly ...”

“... a left-wing victory was necessary for Spain’s democratic health. But now the Socialists have held too much power for too long. The PSOE has become too much part of the state, its members are in too many public positions, its control of many things – most glaringly of television – is too strong and too obvious. Spain has become too felipista just as ...”

“... was a reasonable adjective to use. ‘Organic democracy’ was of course a nonsense: it was held to stem from ‘natural organisms’ (the family, the municipality and the syndicate) rather than from unnatural, inorganic things like political parties. In any case, organic or otherwise, the regime was never a democracy. Franco’s ostentatious ...”

“... with the robust octogenarian, or nonagenarian, who attributes his longevity to a course of living held up as an example to all. Early rising, daily walks, simple diet, abstention from alcohol and tobacco, and a list of virtues are paraded for our inspiration, however contradictory and inconsistent they may be.’ His life, he was well aware, was likely to be ...”

“... and the threat of violence, by the total uncertainty and instability of day to day life. ‘People held their lives to be of no value,’ one Chinese writer said. ‘They knew none of the joys of being alive.’ As Parker points out, rates of suicide, abortion, infanticide and abandonment soared, as did the incidence of ‘melancholia’, many cases of which ...”

“... exists, they usually point to its cars, those Eisenhower-era Buicks and Oldsmobiles and Plymouths, held together by Cuban ingenuity and powered by Russian engines and other improvised innards. But on the Malecón, the grand boulevard along the Caribbean at the city’s northern edge, stands a row of other remnants from that era: battered off-white hulks like a ...”

“... style is fluid but all too unvarying. He tends to begin a paragraph by paraphrasing some commonly held view of the English: ‘Removing the lower-class Englishman from his own environment evidently had the effect of loosening his moral moorings’; ‘The English were proud of their lack of vindictiveness’; ‘For the English the most savage war seemed a ...”