“... the rights and wrongs. The place was ours, and we went and took it back.’ In The Winter War, Patrick Bishop and John Witherow (who went with the Task Force for the Observer and the Times) conclude: The war had everything in its favour. It was neat and tidy. It had a simple motive and a simple response … No war is to be wished for, but if they have to ...”

“... socialism; fired by Henry George, he was instructed mainly by Marx, whom he actually read (in French). Soon he was an indispensable Fabian. He worked like the devil – it is quite a relief to find him talking about his ‘inveterate laziness’, and to learn that on some days he ‘did practically nothing’. But on such days he must have been working at ...”

“... villain, in its remarkable portraits of a hyper-active yet futile Napoleon, brittle symbol of the French, and an apparently torpid yet supremely sagacious Kutuzov, authentic representative of the slow rhythms of the Russian people and the peasant masses composing its overwhelming majority. Not only this. In War and Peace we find a realism so advanced in its ...”

“... It was ten hours before Lindbergh crossed Newfoundland, 33 hours before he landed in Paris. The French President decorated him; King George V received him at Buckingham Palace; President Coolidge sent a cruiser and an admiral to bring him home. In Chesapeake Bay, Mr Kennedy tells us, the cruiser was met by four destroyers, two army dirigibles and a fly-past ...”

“... write the third chapter of the novel, in which the young Hyacinth Robinson is taken to visit his French mother, who is serving a life sentence for his father’s murder, James visited Millbank Prison by the Thames: ‘a worse act of violence’, he called it, ‘than any it was erected to punish’. Hyacinth is accompanied by the dressmaker who has been ...”

“... token, Mrs Thatcher may believe that Magna Carta secured liberty more effectively than did the French Revolution. But there has as yet been no revival of a British history emphasising native constitutional achievements. Indeed, some of the most unabashed Tory historians seem far more anxious to cast doubt on the importance of traditional constitutional ...”

“... of foreign workers. The title of her chapter on them, ‘Les Rochers Maudits’, extends this French prisoners’ name for Alderney to the Channel Islands as a whole, but the bulk of the chapter – and 12 out of the 14 testimonies – deals with slave labourers’ experiences on Alderney or on their journeys to and from that island. It’s the same when ...”

“... Freud’s death have taken place in object relations theory. Both American ego psychology and the French school of Lacan provide alternatives, but these have proven less fecund than the British tradition of object relations, which comes in distinct Kleinian and Independent forms. The Freud-Klein Controversies makes it possible to understand why psychoanalysis ...”

“... of sensuality and reserve that made her, and eventually her writing, so attractive. Leslie French remembered her playing a lady-in-waiting in Twelfth Night: ‘you never saw a lady waiting so well or so violently; she had terrific poise, so much poise I feared she would topple over backwards.’ In private life David was less restrained. She never ...”

“... family lived in Budapest and summered on the family estates in the southern Carpathians – which Patrick Leigh Fermor has called ‘the most resented frontier in Europe’. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the onset of political and racial turmoil, the Goldfinger family moved to Vienna. In 1920, Ernö went to Paris, by then as a Polish ...”

“... a ‘cradle king’, was crowned at Stirling in 1567. He was thirteen months old. According to the French envoy Albert Fontenay, he had been ‘nurtured in fear’. When Mary Queen of Scots was pregnant with James, her unfaithful and estranged husband, Henry, Lord Darnley, burst into her room at Holyroodhouse with a band of armed men. After hurling an ...”

“... depths and, for very cogent reasons, make a point of veiling what they get up to – let’s speak French here – by means of ‘le secret d’état’. In the Ben Barka affair of 1965-66, the leader of the Moroccan left was abducted and murdered during a visit to France as the result of a conspiracy involving a large cast of characters including ...”

“... in a British Empire’, as well as against fears of Catholic re-expansion in Europe and the French ‘universal monarchy’. The individuals who counted could all too easily perceive their own advantage as identified with the national interest. Saving one’s estate from creditors coincided happily with the good of Scotland. In Parliamentary ...”

“... for other protagonists in the genre, whether it be the prototypical Odysseus, the 16th-century French peasant Martin Guerre, who has to displace an impostor, or Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, who is received so badly that he relinquishes all claims, including to his own name: ‘But now I am buried underneath the living, under papers, under acts, under the ...”

“... most notorious assassination – the ‘political murder’ of Wrong’s subtitle – was that of Patrick Karegeya, Kagame’s former childhood friend, comrade-in-arms and security chief. In 2006 Kagame had him jailed for ‘insubordination’ – his second stint in prison. On his release he fled to South Africa and formed an opposition party in exile. At ...”