“... with a population a twentieth that of China. As the chief military historian of the campaign, Edward O’Dowd, has noted, ‘in the Korean War a similar-sized PLA force had moved further in 24 hours against a larger defending force than it moved in two weeks against fewer Vietnamese.’ So disastrous was the Chinese performance that all Deng’s wartime ...”

“... It found no favour at all with the British. Nor did it with the State Department. Stimson said that being tough or soft with the Germans was not the issue. The issue was ‘whether the course proposed will in fact attain our agreed objective, continued peace’. The massacre of some American prisoners of war in the Ardennes offensive by an SS ...”

“... to the worst English taste for the mock-Oriental: and I wish that Browning’s fierce sonnet ‘To Edward FitzGerald’ had been chosen amongst the many ‘readings’ of poets by each other which are a feature of the anthology. In Ricks’s edition ‘Maud’ occupies 70 packed pages, some of them with a (justifiably) Falstaffian disproportion between text ...”

“... this seems to have been true from the moment Richie set foot in Japan. ‘In Okinawa,’ he later said, ‘I felt my testicles descend to the earth.’ The received view of Japan is of a rather prissy, buttoned-up place, but Richie found the erotic all around him: in the ‘studied expressionless faces and blank dark eyes’ of the bugaku dancers, and the ...”

“... the Catholic cultural patron has been drawn out by, among other historians, Chelsea Reutcke, Edward Corp, Eilish Gregory and Peter Leech. The Licensing Act of 1662 had prohibited the publication of popish books, but Catholic writers could look to Catherine for protection. Her chaplain Thomas Godden, for example, dedicated his controversial defence of the ...”

“... been divided between the Club and the Mob,’ one veteran columnist, channelling de Tocqueville, said … ‘I’m afraid I’m on the side of the Club.’If a column was about economics, culture or science, you could have ‘quite a reasonable discussion. If it was about feminism, or Israel/Palestine or Islam or immigration, then the threads could soon turn ...”

“... lifetime. According to Hugo Young, Thatcher had to be talked into Right to Buy by a desperate Edward Heath, then her leader, who’d been persuaded by his friend Pierre Trudeau after his electoral defeat in February 1974 that he needed a fistful of populist policies. No wonder Thatcher baulked. Right to Buy violated basic Thatcherite values: that ...”

“... Lord Lane, the Lord Chief Justice, went further. Delivering the court’s judgment, he said that ‘the officers must have lied,’ and that ‘if they were prepared to tell this sort of lie, then the whole of their evidence becomes suspect.’ He continued: ‘It is of some comfort to know that these matters are now in the hands of the Director of ...”

“... himself – by the American Medical Bureau to Save Spanish Democracy. The AMB was the creation of Edward Barsky, a young East Coast doctor whose father had founded the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston in 1916. Barsky was already a member of the Communist Party when he began raising money for medical equipment and calling on US doctors and nurses to serve in ...”

“... aspirations. In Egypt in the same year as Amritsar, disorder was put down by General Sir Edward Bulfin with ‘such a display of force as would bring conviction that conflict with the Government was hopeless’. Floggings, shootings, hangings and the burning of houses and livestock, as a result of which 1500 people died, achieved the desired ...”

“... was three) and buying a Ford Cortina (last produced in 1982). Speaking of strikes in the 1970s, he said: ‘All of us have memories of mass meetings, Red Robbo and the will of the membership being entirely overlooked by terrible abuse of procedure.’ I haven’t checked the archive footage of the meetings chaired by the British Leyland trade union convenor ...”

“... candidates. ‘Once she opened her mouth, the rest of us began to look rather second-rate,’ he said, then added: ‘Her knowledge and eloquence were a source of some irritation to her fellow candidates.’ You feel this says as much about them as it does about her. She certainly chose the right party. As Moore remarks, she was neither witty nor an original ...”

“... I do not find it quite as self-evident as the beginning, holds together perfectly’. But then he said that ‘the political and social analyses are rather on the long side.’ He admitted his own chronic inability to understand … a phrase like ‘the Irish people’, or to imagine that it ever gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art ...”