“... one’s foreign opponents seek to publicise one’s activities, but the continuing bureaucratic war for scarce resources not infrequently leads intelligence services to boast of their past coups. Moreover, when military intelligence becomes really important – that is, when there is a war on – large numbers of outside ...”

“... dynasties that flourished across the world between the fall of Napoleon and the Second World War. The story of these remarkable family businesses is far from hidden, though poorly understood. In the beginning were the patriarchs: Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), a contemporary of Goethe, who started off dealing antiquities in the Frankfurt ...”

“... breakthrough in the Reichstag elections. They met in a small, musty room ‘in a third or fourth-class hotel in a very grubby street’, which at the time was the Nazis’ advance headquarters in the capital. ‘I was led upstairs into a tiny bedroom’ with a rumpled bed, where Hitler was waiting for him. He ranted at Ebbutt for forty minutes, speaking ...”

“... populism – a tone in which Crossman was to be something of a specialist. During a fairly good war, which he spent in the weird and suggestive interstices of the Political Warfare Executive, Crossman seems to have become an early private fan of the emerging ‘special relationship’: admiring the broader American resources and broader American minds, and ...”

“... a study of love in the light of that remark, but also in the light of other facts of life, such as war and death. The events of the Great War and what followed it left Gerhardie with a hatred and contempt for war, and the people who made war, sentiments ...”

“... night before a cataract operation. His courtship had been all but shattered by a religious tug-of-war, which led to a nervous breakdown: he clung to the mysteries of Christianity while his bride-to-be was a sturdy Unitarian. His daughter quotes from their courtship letters, as she later quotes from her own. At Oxford, as the Zuleika Dobson of the ...”

“... at Bryn Mawr, travelled to England at his invitation – not without difficulty, for the 1914 war was about to begin – only to find that he had no use for her, being otherwise engaged. He blamed her for the ensuing embarrassments: ‘her selfishness does not make me dislike her, tho’ it might make me hate her if I were made to suffer by it.’ So he ...”

“... By spring​ 1919, Robert Graves was a demobilised war veteran, a new father and the author of four volumes of poetry. At this moment came ‘the first poem I wrote as myself’, as his autobiography describes ‘Rocky Acres’. After surviving years of front-line bombardment, a shell splinter through his right lung and the postwar influenza epidemic, Graves had returned to his cottage in the Welsh hills ...”

“... grandfathers, one Irish, the other Turkish, were both imprisoned without trial during World War Two. Jim O’Neill was arrested in 1940, when Eamon de Valera’s Government, fearful that IRA activities might compromise Eire’s neutrality, rounded up all known IRA men. He was held for four years at the Curragh internment camp in County Kildare. Joseph ...”

“... about my novels?’ The novels were not quite forgotten, however. Johnson sees the First World War as crucial in rescuing Austen from the ‘Aunt Jane’ tradition. In 1917 the travel writer and horticulturist Reginald Farrer published a centenary essay in the Quarterly Review, marking the transition from Victorian Janeism to a modernist version that saw ...”

“... who declined to send official condolences on the news of his death because he was a ‘first-class cad’. Hemingway, yet more succinctly, described him as a ‘jerk’. Despite all this it can often seem that d’Annunzio was indeed ‘capable of everything’. Poet, novelist, dramatist, bibliomaniac, fashion guru, serial seducer, cocaine ...”

“... colleges had been forced to shut down early in the wake of the Kent State massacre; anti-war protesters battled construction workers in the streets of New York; self-proclaimed political prisoners attempted bloody escapes; middle-class students planted bombs and robbed banks. In August that year, Richard Nixon took ...”

“... Schwindelns’, a chronic deception or swindle. Hofmannsthal disdained the standard middle-class public for literature and theatre and no doubt opera (certainly he disdained the Strausses, whom he found severely trying in person, though he was delighted with the way Richard transformed his earning potential). Of impressively aristocratic bearing ...”

“... surrender monkeys’. As Howard shows, French diplomacy has been involved in a continuous war of manoeuvre against the Anglo-Saxons. Its existence has rarely been acknowledged, so Howard’s study is especially valuable; though there are some lacunae and a few mistakes it also contains a great deal of useful material. He starts with the confrontation ...”

“... that stuck was Cristina Campo. Her parents, Guido Guerrini and Emilia Putti, descended from upper-class families. Campo’s paternal grandmother was a countess. Her mother’s family, the Putti, had been influential in Bologna for centuries. Vittorio Putti, Campo’s uncle, was a world-famous orthopaedic surgeon. Campo was born with a heart defect: the ...”