“... Muscovy and Prussia, on either side of the Commonwealth, grew into despotic, centralised military powers, soon to become predatory empires. The other path to safety, strangely, was to be weak, malleable and manipulable. Authority in Poland-Lithuania was widely distributed, to put it mildly. That suited neighbours like Russia: factions could be bought and ...”

“... allowed the pope to hire and fire his English bishops and give their dioceses English placenames. Richard II’s prime aim in the Great Praemunire Statute of 1392 was to prevent the pope and his favoured cardinals from taking juicy revenues out of England. British membership of the EU has, per contra, attracted billions of foreign capital to Britain, while ...”

“... the judges made life difficult for some of the canal and railway boards, they also used their powers to compel reluctant local justices, most of whom were themselves employers, to convict mill-owners of breaches of provisions of the Factories Acts designed to protect workers from injury or death. And when in 1863 a builder called Cooper found that the ...”

“... CIA was a Soviet spy. After such sleuthing it is a relief to find in this book of essays edited by Richard Langhorne an article on the Cambridge spies by a don, and it is by far the most sensible account so far written. It is the best because Christopher Andrew is a historian at Corpus Christi, Cambridge who has become the leading authority on the Intelligence ...”

“... us. I got up and went to the laptop. The Times front page was online: ‘Salmond quits as powers for Scotland are blocked’. The devo-max ‘vow’ was already falling apart, surprise surprise, the ‘vow’ that Cameron, Miliband and Clegg had all signed and presented to the Scottish people on the front page of the Daily Record, where it was mocked ...”

“... on China in 1859-60, after the Chinese emperor resisted a trade treaty insisted on by the two powers, who had just bombarded Canton. More than 200 ships arrived with 23,000 men and modern artillery, attacked the forts on the river Pei-ho, and opened a path to Peking. After the Chinese captured and tortured a Times correspondent, the allied forces razed ...”

“... green contact lenses, painfully painted on. Sole survivor of Atlantis, he used his special powers, notably the ability to survive high atmospheric pressure, to foil the evil plans of an evil-looking villain with an evil-looking beard and an evil-sounding German name: Schubert. Even my enormous teenage appetite for the fantastical and men in swimming ...”

“... and the Ottomans, and at various moments they openly acknowledged the superiority of the Muslim powers with which Elizabeth repeatedly put England on friendly terms.’ Elizabethan England’s encounter with Islam was not a clash of civilisations – not least because England’s status as ‘civilised’ was hardly settled in early modern ...”

“... every high-profile prosecution launched since 11 September 2001, from John Walker Lindh and Richard Reid to Zacharias Moussaoui and José Padilla. This is particularly mystifying given Ferguson’s pronouncements elsewhere. He asserts in his introduction that ‘we learn from the past in order to guard us from ourselves,’ and his case studies ...”

“... competition of vulgar ‘empiricks’, often peddled their own proprietary nostrums. The great Dr Richard Mead hawked a rabies powder under his own name; Dr Hans Sloane marketed medicinal chocolate; Dr Nehemiah Grew took out a patent on Epsom Salts. How to make a medical reputation in such a world? How to make a medical living? A satirist advised the upwardly ...”

“... of ‘obscenity’). It says on page 3, wrongly, that in the same case John Mortimer defended Richard Neville, and on page 122 that he did not. In one of the brief excursions into cinema, there is a very muddled account of the French treatment of pornographic films. Pasolini’s Salo was not assigned to the ‘P’ category and sent to the blue ...”

“... resources (fire stations, barracks, power stations and so on). Its existence proves how close the powers that be thought they were to a revolution. It is unique – all copies were supposed to have been destroyed – and came to the British Library from the Ministry of Defence only in 1995. Even longer under cover was the map on which ...”

“... perpetually present – and never more so than in this almost incredibly vivid biography. Richard Holmes has a genius for the job, as he showed fifteen years ago in his biography of Shelley. In a sense, there is no need to bring Coleridge to life, but in this compelling narrative of those early years of the poet Holmes makes us seem actually to be ...”

“... with Japanese to a degree he makes plain even to me who know not a syllable of the language, Richard Bowring has forfeited some command of English. That looks all the likelier when he skids into bad grammar: ‘ ... sent to whomever was to copy out the story’. Or perhaps both the ‘indiscrete’ and the ‘whomever’ are misprints. If so, there is ...”

“... that the US should assume ‘leadership of a united democratic bloc’ against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia and has found an influential reader in John McCain, an old-style promoter of American toughness. But it’s now quite hard to imagine Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, not to mention Osama bin Laden and other ‘enemies of the Free ...”