“... four hundred miles, the confederation had unified existing local polities through a combination of war and diplomacy. It is considered to have been mostly the creation of the evidently remarkable Ratsimilaho himself, who was probably in his late teens when he rose to power. As a child he had visited England, most likely with his father (‘Captain ...”

“... whose pioneering work on reconstructive techniques during and immediately after the First World War earned him a CBE. Both fathers were much loved, and both died suddenly at a relatively young age. Neither daughter received much in the way of formal education, but each took every available opportunity to educate herself. There the resemblances ...”

“... the extent of the calamity. Cohen favours more arresting comparisons such as the Holocaust, World War Two and thermonuclear devastation, almost implying that Yeltsin inflicted deeper wounds than Stalin. To drive home his claim that Russia’s internal woes also pose a threat to the West, he adds that ‘the nuclear danger is greater today than it was under ...”

“... Martha Gellhorn, the war reporter and writer who feared nothing on earth so much as boredom, and hated the ‘kitchen of life’, was enamoured of a different drudgery – life’s cardboard boxes. She moved house obsessively from continent to continent, America to Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, back and forth: I daren’t venture an exact number of proper residences, but it’s more than a dozen, in almost as many countries ...”

“... ism: the one that took its name from the Fasci di Combattimento (organisations of First World War veterans) marshalled by Mussolini from 1919 into the Partito Nazionale Fascista. Marinetti was born in 1876 in Egypt to wealthy Italian parents. He was educated in French at a Jesuit lycée in Alexandria, and sent to Paris in 1894 to take his baccalauréat at ...”

“... sound narrative history posed to a publisher looking for a catchy title. Even so, The First Cold War is an unhelpful one. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain and Russia did not seek to divide the world between them and very rarely pointed weapons at each other. Russia fought almost two dozen wars after 1783, but only the Crimean ...”

“... winner of the Duke of York’s Trophy, and world-record holder in the one and a half litre class. Voraciously homosexual in private life, Carstairs dressed like a beautiful man, smoked cigars, and was pursued from race to race by a gaggle of female fans. (Sir Malcolm Campbell of Bluebird fame called her – apparently without irony – ‘the greatest ...”

“... effective style of leadership to the crises of the Great Depression and the Second World War: a combination of charm and exuberance that inspired millions of Americans with hope in grim times and allowed him to pursue skilful diplomatic relationships with Churchill and Stalin. His New Deal created an American version of the welfare state – a ...”

“... introduced; a new self-consciousness developed about educating the governing and administrative class of the future; and the sense of the universities’ place in the national culture grew. Second, in the 1870s and 1880s new universities were established in the great cities which had grown up as a result of industrialisation, such as ...”

“... Camus’s real father, Henri Cormery had been mobilised in the opening weeks of the First World War and fatally wounded on the Marne, when his son was only a few months old. At the graveside, Jacques realises, first, that he is now ten years older than his father was when he was killed, that the ‘natural order’ has been overturned when a son can be ...”

“... to explain why Britain’s great commerical rival of the 17th century had deteriorated to second-class status by the mid-18th. Her answers amount to an account of missed opportunities, of rulers who lacked the will to power, and of citizens who refused to pay the financial price of greatness. It is a didactic exercise in which Tuchman occasionally displays ...”

“... once or twice round a field. It’s an odd thing that though I can remember things from World War One – German prisoners being marched through the streets, biplanes practising looping the loop, and that heart-stopping “falling leaf” descent – I have no recollection whatever of the Armistice of 1918.’ Mr Turner’s living-room has a collection of ...”

“... and from Christ’s Hospital to St John’s. After Oxford, he became a schoolmaster; during the war, he rose from lance-corporal in the Intelligence Corps to captain in the Education Corps. While Jay was using the City page of the Daily Herald to make propaganda against appeasement, Stewart was teaching economics to sixth-formers; while Jay was helping to ...”

“... to death. Another 162 had been injured, many of them maimed for life. Most were young and working-class. Many were of Irish origin. Not a single one of them could by any stretch of the imagination be held responsible for or even sympathetic to British government policy in Northern Ireland. The universal horror at this, the biggest killing of civilians in ...”

“... who would go on to present their own take on the nuclear threat, in a sketch called ‘Civil War’.In that sketch, a worried Moore listens trustingly as a succession of posh-voiced government spokesmen seek to reassure him that all the appropriate measures are in place in the event of a nuclear attack. When he voices disbelief that a four-minute warning ...”