“... millions of casualties. It was characteristic of him not to see anything odd about adding: ‘An English historian can praise ... Henry VIII without being supposed to condone the beheading of wives.’ Carr’s views and prose style owed much to his experience of the Foreign Office, which he did not leave until his mid-forties. At Cambridge, he excelled as a ...”

“... Did the United States invade Iraq with this objective in mind? The leader of the study group was Richard Perle, who became head – now, after press disclosure of a conflict of interest, he is a mere member – of the Defense Policy Board under Donald Rumsfeld. Another member of the study group was Douglas Feith, now the Pentagon’s Under Secretary for ...”

“... extremism by their teachers.’ And it saw no evidence at all of ‘an organised plot to take over English schools’. But by then the soundbites had gone round the world and back again – Fox News claimed Birmingham was a ‘no-go zone’ for non-Muslims, and that Birmingham’s schools were in crisis, especially Park View. Trustees resigned, staff ...”

“... death, an omission which he came to regret (his account of this episode has been deleted from the English translation). In May 1969 the Minister transferred him back to the Academy’s Institute of Physics in Moscow where his career had begun, with a modest salary to supplement his Academician’s income. Sakharov describes his scientific work from then on as ...”

“... which the form demands that you ‘stalk imaginary beasts like “Existential Marxism” ’). Richard Rorty (in Judt’s book, an embodiment of relativism and nihilism second only to Sartre himself) is appealed to by Khilnani for a more principled repudiation of the history of philosophy itself: a fictive narrative in which ad hoc positions are ...”

“... racing and poetry. One of his favourite pastimes was to challenge friends to find him a piece of English poetry that he didn’t know – sportingly, he warned them off Eliot since he knew all his work by heart. The war interrupted but did not stop his playboy-poet life. In 1940 his unit fled before the advancing Germans to Neufchâtel, where they dug a ...”

“... the British Empire’s eastern division, and given the obsession of all these authors with the English class system (Roland Perry gets so carried away that he repeatedly refers to ‘Lord Victor Rothschild’ in a book published by the ancient firm of Lord Frank Longford) and, finally, given the belief of Anthony Cave Brown that treason is a heritable ...”

“... of his own gaucheries and existential contingencies, other people’s table-talk or Stravinsky’s English (as controversially recorded in the conversation books). But he is still left with an alter ego he would quite like to murder. That need not worry us, however. Our problem is only to accept the exaggerations and selective detail of a style based teasingly ...”

“... gifts with Bach’s great keyboard masterpieces – the Partitas, Toccatas, French and English Suites, Inventions, both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, most of the Art of Fugue – became almost the core of the repertoire. Brendel, Pollini, Barenboim and Martha Ageriach were consolidating their presence at the same time but none of them had a ...”

“... us flew out together, Air India, first class: Michael Foot, Jean Floud, William Radice, with Sir Richard Attenborough in pursuit. It was my pleasure to travel with my old friend and newly-minted Dame, Iris Murdoch. I’ve never travelled first before, and well! Cocktails, champagne, caviar, lobster ... Young Dame Iris, by the way, took all as her customary ...”

“... a fact which the British Government chose to disregard in 1917. Some thirty years afterwards the English Zionist Arthur Koestler described the Balfour Declaration as ‘one of the most improbable documents of all times’, since in it ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’. ‘Iimprobable’ the Balfour Declaration ...”

“... a culture of irresponsibility’ got under way. He also maintains that, ‘from the arrival of English-speaking colonists in 1607 until 1965, there was one continuous civilisation built around a set of commonly accepted legal and cultural principles.’ Not only is this a virtually Panglossian account of the colonial revolution, the Civil War and ...”

“... days, it isn’t a machine that sits in a publisher’s computer room, but a cloud service, in English-language news publishing almost always provided by Google. (UK news publishers often worry that advertising revenue they should be getting is instead going to Google. Distrust of Google and resentment of its dominant position are common. But Google also ...”

“... which preceded it. It is no accident that millenarians who, like the Fifth Monarchy Men of the English Revolution, identify themselves with this kingdom are rarely supporters of established social traditions. Because he gives a description of the social and psychological changes that effect the degeneration of the metals and which culminate in the rule of ...”

“... Liberal Party. Thomas-Symonds makes clear that it made a difference which valley you came from. English-speaking towns like Ebbw Vale and Tredegar in Monmouthshire were Labour towns, unsusceptible to the apocalyptic communism of the Rhondda Valley slightly further west. In his early years, before he became a Labour councillor, Bevan was attracted by the ...”