“... of Nations.’ Disillusionment with Versailles, and the revulsion against nationalism, were the major reasons for the decline in Mazzini’s reputation, particularly in the English-speaking world. It cannot be denied that the idea of the ‘national mission’ lends itself to dangerous uses, and that Mazzini did not resist the temptation to assign Italy a ...”

“... almost to zero. There has never been a really successful modern recasting of Beowulf apart from John Gardner’s anarchic Grendel of 1971. (Michael Crichton’s disastrous and vainly Scandinavianising Eaters of the Dead has just been hauled back into print on the back of Jurassic Park.) The only Anglo-Saxon novels of any weight are about defeat and the end ...”

“... representative, ‘we cannot attack; the Jews might attack us in turn.’ In his memoirs, Sir John Glubb tells a rather similar anecdote. When the first independent Syrian government was formed after the 1939-45 war, the President asked for an estimate of the cost of a tank regiment. A British officer included a sum for a workshop. This was immediately ...”

“... screen of hysteria blots out the folded hemlocks.’ It was decades later that poets such as John Ashbery or Paul Muldoon helped Anglophone poetry to a convincing use of Surrealist licence for its own ways and meanings. In any case, at the end of the Thirties Gascoyne himself had effectively abandoned Surrealism, and with it ‘The Rites of ...”

“... for making the European Human Rights Convention directly enforceable in British courts – a major constitutional change which would mean more rather than fewer applications for judicial review. And he warned liberally-minded judges, like Lord Woolf and Justices Laws and Sedley, against ‘judicial supremacism’ following articles in which they seemed ...”

“... that the wars of the 1860s and 1870s occurred. James Belich is already the author of two major studies, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Myth of Racial Conflict and I Shall Not Die: Titokouwaru’s War, New Zealand 1868-9, in which he has viewed both sides of the hill, emphasising that the Maori were formidable and very modern belligerents ...”

“... Fox says, ‘the spirit of the new entered Houston.’ Nearly twenty years later he designed with John Burgee the first of his giant commercial buildings, Pennzoil Place. It stands towards the edge of the Downtown cluster of corporate towers, and makes a subversive play on them by actually being two towers, only ten feet apart. Their surface is refinedly ...”

“... and tells me ideally she would vote for a bizarre dream-ticket of Bradley and Republican senator John McCain, who both advocate it. But most are straightforwardly undecided between Bradley and the other Democratic contender and favourite, Al Gore. Bradley arrives, six and a half feet tall and ramrod straight. He walks round the room, shaking hands and saying ...”

“... terrorism, legitimising more and more suspensions of legal and other rights? The ominous aspect of John Ashcroft’s recent claim that ‘terrorists use America’s freedom as a weapon against us’ carries the obvious implication that we should limit our freedom in order to defend ourselves. Such statements from top American officials, especially Rumsfeld and ...”

“... Adam Smith, was the theory of the marketplace of ideas. In the mouth of Justice Holmes, echoing John Stuart Mill, this became part of the jurisprudence of the First Amendment: ‘The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.’ Holmes’s dictum is cited by Lord Steyn in a significant recent ...”

“... Young Man Luther and Gandhi’s Truth – came out in 1958 and 1969; the first inspired John Osborne’s play, the latter won several prizes. In both he focused on turning-points (or identity crises) in the lives of the great men to whom he felt drawn. Luther is rather more tied down to the psychoanalytical than Gandhi: the amorphousness of Indian ...”

“... home to Angola. But of course the Government had enough in the way of oil revenues to sustain a major war effort, while the Angolan commanders, some of them, were just as good as Unita’s, often better, and they had the benefit of a Cuban contingent whose numbers were steadily growing, partly in response to Washington’s aggressive posture. With ...”

“... ongoing projects elsewhere: Jean-Marie Le Pen and Umberto Bossi, for example, or Ian Paisley and John Hume, who are merely adding a third Parliamentary seat to those they already hold at Westminster and in the Northern Ireland Assembly. A number of MEPs first achieved celebrity in other fields: Dana, the Irish Eurovision popstar, Michael Cashman, one-time ...”

“... steals The Magnificent Seven not through hat-waving and underplaying, but because he laid siege to John Sturges to persuade him to increase the size of his role, and was charming and animated on-screen while everyone else was busy being dour. Charles Bronson and James Coburn were underplaying each other into inanimacy; Brynner was playing Gary Cooper. McQueen ...”

“... and most threatening of all the rebellions against the Tudors, the Pilgrimage of Grace. Such major events deserve exhaustive treatment, and Bernard gives the Pilgrimage more than a hundred pages. Against a mass of scholarship which investigates the various social and political dimensions of this convulsive event, Bernard insists, almost monocausally, on ...”