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“... had been to bring about German unity. They were the true patriots, the West German political class the traitors to the nation. Was it not Ludwig Erhard who, at American instigation, introduced a new currency, Konrad Adenauer who put liberal capitalism above unity, the Western allies who rejected Stalin’s offer of a neutral united Germany in 1952? Once ...”

“... He also wrote one well-received novel, The Gardener who saw God. He spent the Second World War in the United States, largely in California, where he was for a time attracted by the then fashionable mysticism of Gerald Heard. He also discovered Mexico, where he was later to spend much money building follies near Xilitla. After the ...”

“... the 17th century, thanks to frequent encounters with Richelieu’s armies in the Thirty Years’ War, the duel established itself in the Holy Roman Empire. Later, German abolitionists liked to point out these foreign origins. The duel was ‘a chapter in the history of this pitiful German copying of French fashions’, wrote Georg von Below in 1896. From the ...”

“... Comenius ranks with Erasmus and the rebellion of Bogdan Chmielnicki is treated as seriously as the War of the Spanish Succession. And this is not just a matter of ‘restoring’ Eastern and East-Central Europe to the general story, the story itself becomes a quite different one. All those ‘European histories’ which are really self-congratulatory ...”

“... glamour of outlaws recycling the wealth of the city. Conrad is hardest on his professional middle-class characters, living comfortably in their sterilised tower blocks but obsessed with the valley and its symbolism. Paul, an architect with what seem rather dated Modernist views, dreams of obliterating the valley by covering it over with a cantilevered ...”

“... is your Grand Parc des Sources? Where are your salles de pulvérisation? And your first-class gargling-room? Have you no radioactive muds? We do not ask for dew-treading meadows, but what about a quiet garden with rows of brine-soaked hedges?’ The hard truth is that Britons lost faith in the water cure – almost any form of water cure, internal ...”

“... could be trusted by Israeli Jews – Palestinian citizens of Israel are now officially second-class – to manage the occupation, and to expedite the various tasks the Jewish state has mastered: killing Gazans, bulldozing homes, combating the scourge of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS), and conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. With ...”

“... base on the coast of Greenland to which Kavenna makes a bleak trip at the end of her book. A Cold War relic, Thule Air Base survives in a scaled-down way, on perpetual standby in the new War on Terror: about as limp a pretext for a military base inside the Arctic Circle as one could imagine. Indeed, Kavenna might have said ...”

“... refuses to comment on their short-lived joint practice. The creation of James Stirling, world-class architect, the man who as much as Philip Johnson or Arata Isosaki invented the ‘signature building’ and who travelled the rewarding circuit of international big money prizes, lectures and juries from the 1960s onwards, is a very contemporary tale of ...”

“... The now famous design for the angled black granite walls, carved with the names of the 58,000 US war dead and cut into the ground on the Mall in Washington DC, was selected through a blind competition. Its abstraction offended those hoping for a properly heroic tribute, but more troubling to some was the identity of the designer, Maya Lin, a 21-year-old Yale ...”

“... any longer than necessary’. Iraqi nationalism was at a low ebb during the sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia in Baghdad in 2006-7, but as sectarian slaughter has declined it has begun to reassert itself. There is an edgy mood both in the Iraqi government and among ordinary Iraqis. The number of dead bodies being picked up in the streets of ...”

“... even Dr Searle’s researches reveal very little. What is striking about Lloyd George’s Boer War charges against Joseph Chamberlain is how much Ll.G could make out of the exiguous materials at his command. A family as deeply embedded in Birmingham industry as the Chamberlains were bound to be involved in ...”

“... eating and tirelessly talking his way through more than fifty years of politics, statecraft and war. Yet these two supreme egotists became as close friends as their personalities permitted, and it may be argued that anyone who is thankful that Britain ended the Second World War on the winning side should count ‘the ...”

“... presumptive POW status all indicate a casual disregard for international opinion and the laws of war. Most disturbing, however, are some of the threats uttered by President Bush. The assertion that ‘you’re either with us or against us’ obviates a central aspect of state sovereignty – the right not to be involved – and recasts the US as the ultimate ...”

“... a liaison officer attached to the French naval forces in Scotland. It’s the time of the Phoney War, but phoniness isn’t much admired in Greenock, then or now, and Shoosky soon becomes something of an awkward man of feeling amid the hard drinkers and morose skippers of the town. He is ‘homeless, stateless’ – the transplanted son of ‘small aristos ...”