“... than his revelation – in January 1990 – that in mid-March 1989, three months after Lockerbie, George Bush rang Margaret Thatcher to warn her to ‘cool it’ on the subject. On what seems to have been the very same day, perhaps a few hours earlier, Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Transport, Paul Channon, was the guest of five prominent political ...”

“... with Haig and Robertson that the war could only be won on the Western Front and those, like Lloyd George and Churchill, who believed in ‘knocking away the props’ – but between those who believed in a traditional British strategy of minimal military and maximal economic contribution, of harbouring economic strength in support of Continental allies who ...”

“... the Art Nouveau designer resisted the effects of industry, even as he also sought, in the words of Walter Benjamin, ‘to win back its forms’ – modern concrete, cast iron and the like – ‘for art’. There is no such resistance in contemporary design: it delights in post-industrial technologies, and it is happy to sacrifice the semi-autonomy of art and ...”

“... than unites them. In the Renaissance they were barely separable. Writers – Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom and influencing events. History, which was seen as a ...”

“... to follow. But Two Thousand Million Man-Power stops dead, for no apparent reason, shortly after George V’s funeral procession in London on 28 January 1936. It thus omits a key event in the story of the bomber’s increasing supremacy, the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in July (Guernica was hit on 26 April 1937). The focus, towards the end of the ...”

“... has analogies with another new theatrical fashion: the ‘humours comedy’ of the mid 1590s – George Chapman’s An Humorous Days Mirth (1597) and Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) are well-known examples – and the slicker, smuttier ‘city comedies’ of Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, John Marston et al, which follow slightly later. Like the ...”

“... evangelical Christians seemed more powerful than they had ever been. They had helped to re-elect George W. Bush in 2004, in spite of a rickety economy and the disastrous invasion of Iraq. They had waged a successful campaign in Washington to restrict access to late-term abortion. They had launched a series of ballot initiatives intended to prevent states or ...”

“... Arriving in Johannesburg in 1941, Mandela was quickly recruited into the ANC by the remarkable Walter Sisulu, the grandfather of a whole ANC generation. Sisulu (who, at 76, is still in jail and well worth a birthday celebration or two) was the son of a white father who had quickly abandoned his mother, a black washerwoman. He had little education, and had ...”

“... is a German one to steal the secrets of British naval dispositions. Scudder was a good agent, Sir Walter Bullivant of the Secret Service explains, but ‘he had a lot of odd biases, too. Jews, for example, made him see red. Jews and the high finance.’Buchan’s biographers, starting with Janet Adam Smith in 1965, tend to hold up this turnaround as evidence ...”

“... as he was able. Born around 1485, he was a teenager at the turn of the new century. His father, Walter Cromwell alias Smith, was a more or less successful businessman whose brushes with manorial justice were practically routine. His mother’s name may have been Katherine, and her origins can be traced with some close detective work to the Meverell family ...”

“... loan-jobbers, forestallers and other wartime profiteers accused of ripping off ordinary people. Walter Scott, part of a cavalry troop raised to ensure stability on the home front, the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, found his conscience troubled when he was confronted in the line of duty with the looting of a bread shop: ‘Truth to say it was a ...”

“... for a North Sea ferry and postage stamps of Queen Victoria in the shell carriage and King George V as Neptune. Panel 78 charts the rise of Mussolini; Warburg was in Rome in 1929, and witnessed what he called its ‘repaganisation’. The final panel includes a photograph of a hara-kiri ceremony, two late 15th-century depictions of the desecration of ...”

“... we move to its equally emblematic ending with the opening of the Métro. This is work inspired by Walter Benjamin, as Prendergast says, whose ‘imprint’ is to be found ‘virtually everywhere in the following pages’. But the influence has been thoroughly assimilated, converted into practice. Benjamin has provided insights and ways of seeing, but above ...”

“... Now, of course, there is no intrinsic incompatibility between novel-writing and history-writing. Walter Scott was an admirable historian – here indeed lay most of his strength. A case can be made, too, for saying that Flaubert, in L’Education sentimentale, was a better historical thinker – showed a more advanced grasp of historical causation – than ...”

“... Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, and a famous Italian ex-Communist, Ignazio Silone. After this, George Orwell is discussed with special attention to The Lion and the Unicorn and Albert Camus in relation to the Algerian war. The following three chapters are devoted to Simone de Beauvoir, Marcuse and Foucault. The last author (and the only live one) is the ...”