“... emperor, throne, rebel, authority, bestowal of preferments, prerogative) as well as of military conquest (a traditional source of metaphors in transactions between the sexes, also touched on in a new book by Robert Erickson) in their exercises or boasts of sexual tyranny, in ways which sometimes go beyond the idiomatic or ...”

“... militarise Germany, annihilate the neighbouring countries to south and east, and embark on a conquest of the world. Taylor saw something different – still evil, but not in the Hollywood sense that was apparently required. A year or two before, he had written a Bismarck that also clashed with customary opinion: Bismarck turned out to be a man who ...”

“... short-suffering Mosley with his other help-meet Diana Guinness née Mitford. Mosley’s biographer Robert Skidelsky avers that ‘Mosley always tried to maintain the old English distinction between private life and public life.’ But Mosley came up against that other, even more powerful, old English tradition or law which has recently snuffed out ...”

“... that of Iraq, which suffered from a decade of brutal traditional sanctions followed by outright conquest and civil war. In Iran’s case it’s difficult to disentangle the causes, since revolutionary politics had their own effects. But the Obama-era financial punishment of 2011-12 was responsible for an immediate drop in Iranian GDP, wiping out a third of ...”

“... greatest womaniser was hiding something. ‘Byron liked the chase, the reassurance of heterosexual conquest.’ Yet she is sure that his ‘relations with boys’ were his true ‘emotional focus’. It was not just a phase. ‘Byron’s male loves seem to have deepened and flourished with the years.’ She is convinced that, in romantic recollection, he ...”

“... go back a long way. Full-blown feudalism was imposed in one fell swoop from above, by a Norman conquest that left a medieval monarchy structurally always more powerful than its Capetian rival, which slowly and painfully extended its reach, by piecemeal assemblage, beyond the Isle-de-France. Capitalism, in turn, arrived much earlier, in good measure because ...”

“... If, that is, they accepted the Union Treaty, in which the Equivalent figured as Article 15. When Robert Burns wrote ‘We’re bought and sold for English gold,’ he was probably thinking of those Scottish politicians who were directly bribed with cash and job offers, and who became despised and notorious. But the Equivalent was far more effective and far ...”

“... carted off by an English king in an act of plunder which was also intended to be a symbolic act of conquest. Not the Stone, but the presence of the Stone at Westminster served to define one of the underlying realities of the English-Scottish relationship, and it continued to do so even after the 1707 Treaty of Union fused the two kingdoms into one ‘Great ...”

“... Baku was more than 1100 miles from Kabul. British military strategists did not fear the Russian conquest of India – the army officer George de Lacy Evans half-admitted as much in On the Designs of Russia (1828), Russophobia’s foundational text. His concern was that increasing Russian activity beyond India’s borders would ‘disturb and disaffect the ...”

“... Nato embarked in Kosovo, and which is quite inexplicable to those for whom war remains a matter of conquest or defence – most of the world, in terms of population. In the rich countries, the imperative of contentment has suppressed what remained of ‘security politics’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union; we live in what the German sociologist Ulrich ...”

“... remnants of the fifth-century ramparts that failed to preserve decadent Hindu rule from Mughal conquest. Every private house and most public buildings are set inside mud and brick enclosures that give the city an unwelcoming air. Behind the walls, in gardens needing rain, lie separate huts for women, for cooking, for eating and for receiving guests. Only ...”

“... the writing of A Small Boy. Thus in his immensely useful compilation, A Henry James Encyclopedia, Robert Gale maintains that William is ‘the hero of James’s autobiography, especially its earlier parts’. James had himself indicated as much when he first discussed a ‘family book’ with William’s heirs during the months, stretching to nearly a ...”

“... length and breadth of eastern Libya, and had distinguished itself in the resistance to the Italian conquest from 1911 onwards. But like the Hashemites Idris came to the throne as a protégé of the British, who fished him out of Cairo, where he had spent more than 20 years in exile, to make him king and thereby recast Libya as a monarchy in 1951 when the UN ...”

“... a more generous view of Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1980), or indeed Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, might have yielded a more abundant answer. On the other hand, Freud’s warm if critical admiration of England (which, he shared, incidentally, with members of the Viennese Jockey Club), his remarkable command of ...”

“... such powerful images as these become assimilated, their impact diluted. Artists must continue the conquest of new territory and new taboos.’ In a way, I quite appreciate the stunning shamelessness of Rosenthal’s approach as he tries to fend off angry accusations that the work he is showing is obscene and distasteful by invoking the great shock-and-horror ...”