“... Society, in Burlington House on Piccadilly, is a bomb-proof room built at the height of the Cold War to protect the collections of the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné, more commonly known by his Latinised name, Linnaeus. Along with Linnaeus’s books and manuscripts, and his collections of insects and shells, the strongroom houses his herbarium of some ...”

“... To be an Algerian Jew was to be caught between the opposing sides of what would soon become a war of decolonisation.The Derrida family home was a sanctuary, but even there, he said, he felt like a ‘precious but so vulnerable intruder’, since he was born after the death of an older son, Paul, at three months. His mother, Georgette, whom he ...”

“... epoch, Heath was overwhelmingly oriented to Europe, where he had fought during the Second World War, rather than to America. It did not, on the other hand, take him long to hit it off with Pompidou, who did not share Gaullist reservations about the US, to which he paid an official visit in 1970.Pressing Britain’s application for entry to the Common Market ...”

“... historical trail through five more centuries, concluding with Elis’s service in the Second World War. Perhaps Raymond Williams identified himself with poor old Elis. It was an ambitious plan, but Williams was an unskilful storyteller. One tale (set in AD 490) begins: ‘When the teyrn feels the frost, he remembers the taeog.’ No doubt he does ... Hand me ...”

“... from the occupied territories – as South Africa did from Namibia after it failed to win the war in southern Angola – is open to doubt. Nor does Yitzhak Shamir seem inclined to take the sort of bold political initiatives which have left F.W. de Klerk’s supporters and opponents gasping for breath. Israelis generally hate to be compared to white South ...”

“... by intending to show how the ‘phoenix empire’ had survived the great smash of the American War of Independence. Even more practically, he found much to admire in the stabilising apparatus of patronage. Balliol had made him and he could always depend on the support of aristocratic admirers like Blanche Dugdale (A.J. Balfour’s niece) and Philip ...”

“... resettling there. Like Stravinsky and Rachmaninov, he had fetched up in Western Europe after the war, but in essentially different circumstances which crucially affected his view of post-Revolutionary Russia. Unlike them, he was not a dvoryanin (gentry or lesser nobility): his father was an 1860s liberal from merchant stock, a trained agronomist employed as ...”

“... should strive to be masters, not slaves: ‘Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency.’ A stronger type of human being would tear off the veil of hypocrisy, otherwise known as reason and moral virtue, do away with guilt, celebrate instinct, preach violence and follow the call of its fierce heart. Ilinca ...”

“... In Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War, Sir James Manson hires a mercenary called ‘Cat’ Shannon to stage a coup in the tiny West African state of Zangaro – Equatorial Guinea thinly disguised – and replace its tyrannical president with one who will, perhaps, be less tyrannical, and will definitely grant Sir James the highly profitable platinum-mining concession he wants ...”

“... and industrialisation, the Great Terror later in the 1930s, and the Great Patriotic War. The chapters dealing with them, accompanied by photographs worn and cracked like the lives of the people they depict, are the core of the book. Families of kulaks and priests expropriated by neighbours and sent to remote regions of the country; children ...”

“... a contemporary liberal, is a mite nervous of the more extravagant libertarian visions of the Civil War. ‘The moderate path between authority and freedom – the true meaning of liberty,’ he tells us rather sanctimoniously, ‘had not yet been discovered: that was the achievement of enlightened modern men [sic].’ When in doubt, the English think of an ...”

“... has disbursed $50 million in compensation to families whose homes were damaged or destroyed in the war. UN agencies say they have disbursed $40 million, and plan to distribute $40 million more. Gazan shopkeepers began filling the space once occupied by Israel’s exports with goods in Arabic packaging. Cigarettes and chocolate reappeared in Gaza’s ...”

“... he had been involved in an ethnic cleansing experiment dreamed up by the Israelis after the 1967 war, intended to remove as many Palestinians as possible from the newly occupied territories.Mahmoud’s family came from Qastina, a village about 25 miles north of Gaza City in Mandate Palestine. His father, whose parents died when he was young, had been raised ...”

“... fortunate among the wretched.One way to survive was through internal exile. Thirty years after the war, Christian Schad, so forgotten that he had no reputation to blemish, would exhume himself to become a sucker for Oriental religions and an octogenarian flower child. Schad’s minutely rendered subjects were ...”

“... is its brevity. Here is the saga in miniature. Keegan’s Churchill is pre-eminently a man of war and a man of words. The Army made him physically, intellectually and morally – Sandhurst and the years in India and Africa ‘must be counted among the most significant of his life’. The long afternoons spent in Bangalore immersed in Gibbon and Macaulay ...”