“... reasons, food shortages and increasing debility and weariness – unlikeliness of us winning the war etc. etc.’When the news came through of Norton’s death, Elisabeth’s parents, who were in Ankara, sent a telegram to her younger sister Alethea, who was travelling with friends in India. It read: NORTON DIED SUDDENLY BURIAL MEREVALE DO NOT CHANGE ...”

“... into the expanding settlements of the West and the South and into the armies of the Civil War. It starts with the transformation of the mails, whose main purpose for decades had been to circulate print, into a system for transmitting letters. Stamp prices were lowered, post offices were built, mailboxes were attached to lamp posts and home delivery ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was at home with his mother sorting through articles on 18th-century engravers. The ensuing civil war had a more decisive effect. It brought the Eisenstein family romance nicely to the boil. His father joined the White Army, he the Red. One thing not in short supply in the Red Army was theatre troupes (more than two thousand of them by 1920). Eisenstein had a ...”

“... exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees and prisoners’. This was the narrative reported by most journalists, who ignored the statement from the vice president’s office claiming that he and ...”

“... Empire’s governing elite. Capturing the gloom that had been a frequent mood among the senatorial class since the days of the republic, he looked back on his own lifetime, and described the transition after 180 ce from the rule of competent and sane Antonine emperors to that of a bunch of imperial lunatics, chancers and tyrants. It was a precipitous descent ...”

“... of angry Reagan voters, evangelical suburbanites and the elusive ‘Nascar dads’ of the working class who thrilled to the manly nationalism of the hard right. Goldwater was an unlikely revolutionary and his home state an unlikely breeding ground for revolution. One of the last states admitted to the Union (in 1912), Arizona was the closest thing to a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”