“... doubt, but not the man who did more single-handedly to save the world from the danger of nuclear war than anyone. And who, single-handed, ensured that the transition in the USSR and the Soviet empire did not end in a bloodbath, as it did in Yugoslavia. This year I was luckier. The World Political Forum (President: M.S. Gorbachev) sent an invitation from ...”

“... I made my first visit to Belfast when I was almost 11, late in 1939. The war had just started, and Italy had joined Germany in aggression. My father was the sergeant-in-charge of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Warren point, Co. Down and he was instructed to arrest all enemy aliens in the town and convey them for internment to Crumlin Road Jail in Belfast ...”

“... In the book, I argue that several contemporary phenomena – chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, recovered memory, multiple personality disorder, satanic ritual abuse and alien abduction – are hysterical epidemics, real disorders but caused by psychological conflicts rather than viruses, nerve gas, devil worshippers or extra-terrestrials. The ...”

“... strictly limited, there’s always artificial light to read by. I have never had to prepare for a class by candlelight. I have never had to look for matches by the light of the fire. I always have a torch placed where I can find it in the dark. I have absolutely no idea what it would be like to live without electricity or gas, without torch or match, in a ...”

“... seven years later. The reverberations from those events reached a long way: as far as the Cold War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy (maybe), Watergate and, every four years to this day, the American presidential election. It is a story that reminds us of the bond – political, cultural, economic, sentimental – between the United States and Cuba, a ...”

“... in Western historiography: the multigenerational contention over the causes of the First World War. This began before the war itself, as the statesmen chiefly involved in starting it forged arguments exonerating themselves and inculpating their adversaries, arguments that would later resonate in the works of ...”

“... Did he lose his enthusiasm for the French Revolution after the Terror and the outbreak of war with Britain? Or did he merely keep his head down during Dundas’s counter-terror in the 1790s, writing for the drawer and staying secretly in touch with seditious comrades? Most recently, critics have asked where Burns stood on slavery. The poet who raised ...”

“... was held to be more responsible for her husband’s policies than he was, more responsible for the war in Iraq than the rarely mentioned Bush administration, responsible for Obama’s policies as though he had carried out her agenda rather than she his. The narratives cast her as a demoness with unlimited powers, or as a wicked woman, because she had had power ...”

“... intellectual rather than the universal scholar – had begun to emerge following the Second World War. The new intellectuals were concerned with ‘relevance’ rather than excellence; their preoccupations were grounded in the politics and societies around them and in that sense no longer strictly ‘universal’. During the 1960s, a reform movement gathered ...”

“... keeping the ladder of social promotion open, resisting the encroachments of the English governing class’. Ascherson had just left his job as the Observer’s Eastern Europe correspondent to report on Scottish politics for the Scotsman. ‘Coming back,’ he wrote, ‘is not an action which is familiar in the pattern of Scottish activities, if I except ...”

“... to provisional acceptance within the majority culture – a means of transcending racial and class barriers. His male characters enter ritzy Knightsbridge clubs on the arm of well-to-do white women. But there are still pitfalls: one of Moses’s Jamaican friends is treated like a possession by a wealthy Chelsea resident whose house has ‘all sorts of ...”

“... Ashurst sisters, perhaps Mazzini’s closest English friends. For labour leaders and for middle-class radicals alike, Mazzini was a hero, and indispensable financial backing for his enterprises came from industrialists and businessmen in Newcastle, Liverpool and Glasgow. Without the help of John Macadam and other Glaswegians, Mazzini might not have been ...”

“... survived in the British Empire into the 1830s and in the United States until the end of the Civil War in 1865. (This perhaps explains why Americans all but ignored the anniversary of their own country’s outlawing of the trade on 1 January 1808.) Also lost, of late, according to Marcus Rediker, has been the human experience of slavery. Historical debate has ...”

“... is not without resonance today. Just as Bush used the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for a global ‘war on terror’ and violations of civil liberties, so Putin has responded to terrorist acts (terakty, a post-Soviet neologism) by stifling ‘the forward progress of reform’, or even reversing it. Guchkov himself could not resist the temptation to try to ...”

“... marks, along with much else, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the end of the American Civil War, and the inauguration of photography’s increasingly public role in the world. At war’s end Daguerre had been dead for 14 years. And Talbot had long since decided against renewing his patent on the talbotype (or more ...”