“... but the first decade of the Soviet Union, when Soviet policy in a Ukraine exhausted by war and famine was ‘indigenisation’. Ukrainian culture and language were revived, and rights to healthcare, education and social security introduced. Indigenisation followed the principles formulated by Lenin in quite unambiguous terms: The proletariat ...”

“... Ismet Pasha, and other makers of the new country in astrakhan hats and the military garb of the War of Independence. The other side portrayed them as modern statesman in Western-style suits and ties. The Kemalists, the secular nationalists who founded the state, hated the Ottoman Empire at least as much as the West had. Getting rid of its traces left a void ...”

“... in its current form, preferably with no negotiations, in a liminal situation between cold and open war. The second wishes to dance with the conflict – to negotiate and negotiate as if there were no tomorrow. For the third bloc, there is no conflict at all: the elections are about VAT, the middle class and ‘what it means ...”

“... It was​ in the early 1960s, I think, that our class at a small-town Gymnasium made a trip to south-western Germany, accompanied by several teachers. We visited Heidelberg and Schwetzingen and similar places without really seeing them; 17-year-old boys have other things on their minds. But we also went to Rüsselsheim, near Frankfurt, for a tour of the Opel car factory ...”

“... it has been remarked, than in the struggle against Tsarism, the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War combined – among them, many of Lenin’s closest comrades. The flower of the Soviet intelligentsia was destroyed and cultural life paralysed for two decades. Great damage was inflicted on both the Soviet Union’s economy and its defences. Meanwhile the ...”

“... about imports, like Henry Ryecroft, but we don’t infer morality from butter. We may worry about war, like Lord Salisbury, but we don’t infer rivalry between nations from a Darwinian rivalry between species. Those inferences have a history, which is not necessarily our history. They were mobilised, at the turn of the century, by factions and ...”

“... customers, of which there appear to be only four. Archie and Samad were brought together by the war, and their particular war involved driving a tank around defeated towns, until it broke down and they were left without support in a Bulgarian village. Samad is Archie’s teacher, his guru, his misguided conscience, and he ...”

“... more interesting than anything in the biographies themselves. For more than two decades after the war Taylor was, very nearly, the public face of the historical profession in Britain, delivering his pugnacious, often revisionist, views on television and radio, in more than two dozen books and hundreds of newspaper columns, and in countless lectures to Oxford ...”

“... men produced by the public schools and Oxbridge, had not rejected their culture, institutions and class. They had their weaknesses, Annan admitted. Humanists rather than scientists, determined to wear their learning lightly, they had been too complacent about Britain’s international standing and too slow to grasp the economic dysfunction and cultural ...”

“... crisis that was then worsened by his narrow-minded, self-interested opponents. No one wanted the war but it lasted more than ten years and nothing good came of it: ‘It was a hard war to idealise.’ Once the parliamentarians, who held the advantage of manpower and treasure, defeated the king on the battlefield, they fell ...”

“... dim, grey and obscure. An official biography by Sir Keith Feiling, written during the Second World War when Chamberlain’s reputation was at its lowest ebb, eloquently defended his subject’s personal integrity, but did little to dispel the impression of an essentially private and limited individual who had greatness thrust upon him by the high drama of ...”

“... of Wilmington. His firm became the largest supplier of explosives to the Union during the Civil War and it now ranks fourth among US corporations as a generator of air pollution. Among its innovations are nylon, Teflon, Mylar, Tyvek and Kevlar. It made the powder that fired the bullets and it perfected the bullet-proof vest.By the 1970s the DuPont ...”

“... Religion, the Reformation and Social Change examined the ideological crisis of the Thirty Years War and of the political revolutions which followed it. Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, which contains five essays of an average length of about 25,000 words, is in effect a sequel to that volume. It differs from it in containing essays only on Britain, but ...”

“... overcrowded camp in Gallipoli funded by the French. France had bet on the wrong side in the Civil War, and was eager to stop supporting the camps. But it would provide a more permanent home for many of the refugees, among them some of Russia’s most important writers. Gazdanov was born in 1903 in St Petersburg, to an upper-middle-...”

“... the performers ample rewards, as we know from Plato’s Ion. I learned later, from the Preface to War Music, that Logue had undertaken the project at the suggestion of Donald Carne-Ross, who was then commissioning a version of the Iliad for the BBC. I was impressed by the reading, but every now and then found myself at a loss to reconcile what I was hearing ...”