“... England itself, but a large proportion testified to pious Anglo-Norman energy after William I’s conquest of England in 1066, resulting in the formation of a diverse range of communities whose distinctive ‘rules’ for communal life were an implied criticism of the monasteries that had gone before. Well-functioning monasteries constantly do their best to ...”

“... books of the Eighties have been American, and ‘excellence’ is their creed. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Junior’s In Search of Excellence1 appeared in 1982 and it quickly established itself as the best-selling management book ever. Here was an unambiguous riposte to the Japanese economic miracle, that Pearl Harbour of the Carter era. Excellence ...”

“... of soldiers in precious metal encourages further plunder of neighbouring lands for their bullion; conquest of these lands disrupts local economies functioning on credit and trust, as occupying powers demand that taxes and fines be paid in their own imperial coin; and the maintenance of such monetised economies requires the continued presence of the same ...”

“... trotz alledem/Dass rings der Mensch die Bruderhand/dem Menschen reicht trotz alledem.’ It’s Robert Burns. ‘It’s coming yet, for a’ that,/That Man to Man the warld o’er/Shall brothers be for a’ that.’ The poet who translated it, Ferdinand Freiligrath, was soon driven out of Germany into exile. He was one of countless thousands across Europe ...”

“... retired within the boundaries of their colony, which they’d hoped might be a springboard for the conquest of the interior. Another of their hopes was that Eritrea would eventually be settled by land-hungry Italian poor. In the end only about 1 per cent of emigrant Italians opted for the country’s African possessions, America being by far the more popular ...”

“... for casualties. Milder historians may argue that the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford during his conquest of Ireland in 1649 were ‘typical casualties of 17th-century warfare’. But even they find it hard to stomach Cromwell’s pious crowing over the Irish, his determination to see his victories as ‘a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous ...”

“... politics; from the legalisation of abortion and divorce by mutual consent to the translation of Robert Paxton’s Vichy France. He even includes an attack on French filmmakers for portraying French people as narrow-minded and racist, not to mention feminising the image of the ‘white heterosexual male’. And that was only the 1970s, before the arrival of ...”

“... democracy created after Germany’s defeat in 1918 which lasted until Hitler murdered it in 1933? Robert Gerwarth’s book adds to the recent revisions of Weimar by historians out to rescue that particular Germany from popular and international cliché. He refuses to see it as a state doomed from the start by inflation, violence and the collapse of moral ...”

“... for nine centuries and brought about ‘the largest redistribution of land since the Norman Conquest’. It would take three generations to begin to recover from this ‘colossal self-inflicted cultural catastrophe’. What English architecture might have been without the Reformation is unknowable, but Brindle offers a counterfactual hint in his account ...”

“... and its story half-told. The crucial evasion, he believes, is the refusal to own that this is a conquest society that compounds its bloody dispossession of the original inhabitants by obliterating them from the historical memory. Until that wrong is remedied, the failure to confront the past will vitiate Australian life. Like Jill Ker Conway, John Pilger ...”

“... fact. It was a charge perfectly commonplace among all who knew Ford, friends as well as enemies. Robert Lowell, who met him through Allen Tate near the end of his life, quotes the story of Ford, an over-age wartime second lieutenant, playing golf with Lloyd George and giving the PM a piece of his mind on golfing etiquette: had he refrained, he told ...”

“... on to describe Shakespeare’s Dream as, in effect, performing a function analogous to that of Robert Bly’s ‘men’s movement’: the male anxieties revealed by Foreman and de Maisse about being ruled by this dubiously sexy old woman are imaginatively soothed through the conquest of the Amazon queen, Hippolyta, and ...”

“... and made contact with the American counterintelligence corps (forerunner of the CIA): his brother Robert had bills of lading which proved that the Russians were stripping East German factories and sending materials back to the Soviet Union. In 1948, on a trip home to Rostock, Kempowski was arrested by the NKVD and charged with espionage. The experience is ...”

“... to his disciple Horace Traubel, ‘than that we should add one inch of territory to our domain by conquest.’ Nonetheless there are moments in Whitman that tip over into something more troubling: we will build ‘an enlarg’d, general, superior humanity’, he writes in Specimen Days. In ‘Salut au Monde!’, his most translated poem, he moves across the ...”

“... popularity with her accession, it could take nothing for granted. It was less than a decade since Robert Peel had predicted that it would not last another five years, and while the violent civil disorder of the early 1830s had abated, there was still considerable ambivalence towards an institution whose incumbents in the two previous reigns had done much to ...”