“... new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician driven solely by ambition, the tyrant who ran roughshod over the Constitution, and the indecisive leader buffeted by ...”

“... by reference to sub-Freudian categories. One must touch the more ramified ganglia of American Cold War morality, and also of American nervousness about ‘the multicultural’. Hoover’s record and personality can be read as a sort of mirror obverse of what is tiresomely called the politically correct. He was not, for instance, just afraid and ashamed of ...”

“... wireless twice and sometimes three times a day. My father was a distant rumour. He was away in the war, and my mother believed that she might hear something of him if she listened closely enough to the News. ‘Hush! It’s time for the News’ punctuated our days as reliably as a chiming clock. First came the pips at one-second intervals, then: ‘This is the ...”

“... a sophisticated device which, according to an American admiral, will ‘make America invincible in war and therefore be the greatest force for peace ever invented’. The secret agent in this otherwise forgettable movie was played by Ronald Reagan. He is still living inside the film, and he’s managed to lure a nation of 240 million people in with him. A ...”

“... bar of these bland recollections. Both Nora and Furet had been courageous critics of the Algerian War in their youth. But by the time they came to embalm the nation thirty years later, each eliminated virtually any reference to its external record from their retrospections. One would scarcely know France had a colonial empire at all in Furet’s history of ...”

“... of 2019, the political scene in Berlin is in greater flux than at any time since the Second World War. The right-wing Alternative für Deutschland, founded in April 2013 in reaction to the Eurozone crisis, surged into the Bundestag in the 2017 election with 12.6 per cent of the vote. The Social Democratic Party scored only 20.5 per cent – a defeat of ...”

“... like himself to her own wonderful family. It’s here that she drags in another of Hollande’s class jokes: ‘In reality the president doesn’t like the poor. A man of the left, he refers to them in private as “les sans-dents”, very proud of his witticism.’ (It’s a joke about the word sans: les sans abri, people sleeping rough; les sans ...”

“... nobody thought it worthwhile recording anything about them. Only with the rise of the middle class, and the new suburban villas, of the 19th century does something like a recognisable modern garden appear in the record. The 19th-century horticulturalist John Claudius Loudon devotes much of his work to ‘fourth-rate’ gardens, by which he meant gardens ...”

“... invalided home. There, though still in uniform, he recruited for a civilian ministry, and when the war was over he married a girl called Bettine. This seedy curriculum vitae was now about to become even duller and dimmer. There seems to have been a little money about by 1919 (a legacy or two), so Cecil and Bettine went to Pau, where in those days you could ...”

“... father was young again, a soldier, or throwing back his head on slicked-back Derby Days before the war. I stared at all that fame and handsomeness and thought they were the same. Good looks were everything where I came from. They made you laugh. They made you have a tan. They made you speak with conviction. ‘Such a nice young man!’ my mother used to ...”

“... role in Bridge on the Fucking River Kwai the penny drops. Trapped in his own Japanese prisoner-of-war camp for ten years, he’s lied and cursed his way free. ‘I won’t be coming in on Monday’, he tells me confidentially. ‘I’m going to the fucking races.’ Of course he is. I may be there myself. Diality The shock of remembering, having forgotten for ...”

“... is that all that had been cleared up by about twelve years ago, not only well before the China war but well before there was any central government control over Yunnan. All that political work had to have been done first before the Burma Road could have been built at all. The point to get clear about the Chinese bandit situation is that it had been slowly ...”

“... that empire was shoddy, that the end of empire was botched, that British intelligence in the Cold War era was incompetent and that ‘the wan, humiliated, failing country of the 1950s and 1960s’ was ‘propped up … by the monarchy, the Beatles and James Bond’. You may not like the wall-to-wall assertion of decline, but Winder is proposing what he calls ...”

“... picture more.) Some portrait photographs are memorable because the photographer has won a tug of war with the subject – Richard Avedon has described the process in his account of taking photographs of people picked out of the crowd in the American West. Unlike Avedon, McBean, who began his career as a mask-maker, didn’t look for cracks. His photographs ...”

“... into the front plate of his flak jacket as he rocks to and fro in the cold – he discusses the war in the tones of a self-consciously patriotic veteran, laconic, fatalistic, deadpan.His ostensible message is an appeal to Volodymyr Zelensky to withdraw his troops from Bakhmut to prevent further bloodshed. The city, he claims, is almost surrounded. The ...”