“... stuck to the party line of perceiving the war as a necessary and welcome clash between imperialist powers: as communists linked with Moscow, the Partisans had to look on Germany as a nominal non-aggressor as long as the Nazi-Soviet Pact held. It was only when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 that their position became free of ambiguity. But by then they ...”

“... power, the position towards China is anything but clear. A swift Armageddon between the two powers would be worth the ecological scars if it dealt a permanent blow to global consumption. Yet ecological co-operation with China in the present is not likely to be encouraged by fantasies of democratic encirclement or offshore balancing. The US and its ...”

“... fought for their independence against the Ottomans, and later shook off the influence of the Great Powers, inspired democratic partisans across the continent. The Greek victories became common European property, as would the triumphs of the Italians and the Hungarians. After these trials, the Greeks have never taken their place in Europe for granted. They have ...”

“... way to explaining why Ballard’s considerable creative intelligence isn’t always matched by his powers of analysis, a kind of thinking with which he anyway shows a certain amount of impatience: he’s proudly anti-academic. But he is also unquestionably a novelist of ideas – one implication of which is that he would rather explore ideas through narrative ...”

“... or Chatterton or Baudelaire or D.H. Lawrence or Ernest Hemingway as conventional, but what about Thomas Hardy or Anthony Trollope or Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or John Galsworthy? And, in particular, what about John Mortimer? He would, I think, indignantly deny the suggestion, but although he espouses unconventional causes he represents the essential ...”

“... endless cabinet committees and a full-blown public enquiry, the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Thomas Dugdale, during the course of the Commons debate, announced his resignation. If relatively small events can excite such interest in Parliamentary minds, it is not surprising that there are plenty of people prepared to rake over the coals, at an appropriate ...”

“... Mary Stuart back to Scotland; in the royal accounts, his salary is paid for Martinmas Term 1561-2. Thomas Randolph, the Marian exile who was charged with the task of bringing the Earl of Arran back to Scotland in 1559, reported to Cecil in April 1562 that the Queen, instructed by a learned man, ‘Mr George Bowhanan’, read daily after dinner ‘somewhat of ...”

“... respect for the religious behaviour of his fellow Catholics. In politics he took the view that the powers that be were ordained of God. Pope Leo X, a Medici nephew and one of Martines’s pet abominations, hit the nail on the head when he said that the Luther case was ‘a quarrel among monks’, meaning between Dominicans and Augustinians. Much the same could ...”

“... After the first death,’ Dylan Thomas wrote, ‘there is no other.’ I know what he is getting at, I suppose, but it isn’t true, at least not for me. I have had other deaths, but the death last month of my friend Michael Rogin was a shock. It’s not that we had, in recent years, spent much time together. I left Berkeley, where we taught together on the faculty of the University of California, in the mid-1990s, and almost immediately lost touch with most of my network of friends ...”

“... is all the more subversive, it turns out, because her father treated patients with emphysema. Even Thomas Bodger, a hapless 19th-century scientist who has promised the newly chartered Royal Meteorological Society ‘an answer to Helm’s mysteries’, has hidden depths. His wife is ill, and in her absence he develops a chaste crush on her standoffish ...”

“... globalisation as a revolutionary force in the late 1990s, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman became a guru to corporate chieftains from Bangalore to Atlanta with his argument that neutering government, American-style, and deregulating economies were necessary and inevitable steps on the path to a ‘flat world’. After 9/11, George ...”

“... Nativity) but in the High Renaissance ‘magus’ came to mean a worker of occult marvels, using powers that in Simon’s case had turned out to be demonic. Magic also seemed unnecessary to some commentators, who exalted human-wrought wonders such as shipbuilding, navigation, land reclamation, explosives, cryptography and mechanical automata – a tradition ...”

“... from early times and show its inadequacy. A question which remains unresolved is quite what powers the continuing appeal and often passionate adherence to the legend. So much smoke, there must be a fire burning somewhere. But one might well think that, nowadays, it’s recent politics that supplies the match and blows the flame, and not anything to do ...”

“... gained too soon or too late. Such political and personal struggles are a gift to a historian like Thomas Penn, who believes that events are more often driven by strong characters than by impersonal forces. In 2012, Penn’s Winter King – a biography of Henry VII focusing on the last seven years of his life – brilliantly recreated the claustrophobia that ...”

“... point him out; Each Waiter with an eager eye Observes him as he passes by: That there he is, do, Thomas! Look Who’s wrote such a damn’d clever Book. ‘I wrote not to be fed, but to be famous,’ Sterne later said, famously, in a letter probably designed for future publication. By fame he did not mean immortality, such as Pope might have ...”