“... conflict, he warned against the ‘demagogues’ who would suppress dissent in order to push their war agenda: Any argument against the war itself, and any criticism of the persons appointed to carry it on, will become aid and comfort to the enemy. The war will not only become moral over ...”

“... was brought up in Cambridge, the son of the professor of medieval history and himself a post-war Apostle. He begins by whisking us round the colleges telling us what each was like in Victorian times and how the abolition of the religious Tests and the Royal Commission (1872) transformed Cambridge from being a provincial seminary and a federation of ...”

“... in an uncompleted work in six thick volumes which had been gathering dust since their pre-war publication by a university press. Suddenly, astoundingly, Toynbee was news. The effect was shattering. One of the things that was to be shattered, in due course, was Toynbee’s academic reputation. In the Fifties he encountered keen criticism from academic ...”

“... at this time,’ the station announced, ‘we shall speak to you about America and the war … The news may be good or bad – we shall tell you the truth.’ Since then, VOA has produced content in 83 languages and is one of the few independent sources of information available in China and Iran (it was blocked by Russia in 2022). ‘It’s just ...”

“... introduction to the complexities of Guatemalan politics, and I merely assumed – with the Vietnam War and the less-publicised Guatemalan guerrilla war of the Sixties well underway – that another imperial satrap had received his just deserts. The taxi-driver, however, thought it was bad news. There was an evening curfew ...”

“... The exceptions of course were the Poles. There the Catholic Church had preserved across class barriers a stubborn and universal sense of national resistance which had gradually and peacefully found political expression in Solidarity: a body so clearly expressive of the national will that the regime prudently decided to admit it to a share of ...”

“... educate politically.’ Who is not ‘in the know’, in the relevant sense? ‘The revolutionary class of the time, the Italian “people” or “nation”, the citizen democracy which gave birth to men like Savonarola and Pier Soderini’ (Note sul Machiavelli). To keep the doors open is not easy, and not all will pass through them; there are many mansions ...”

“... as the hills they allow us to pass, but their use was far from systematic until the First World War. Before then, Zweig tells us, ‘one embarked and alighted without questioning or being questioned,’ and ‘frontiers … were nothing but symbolic lines which one crossed with as little thought as one crosses the Meridian of Greenwich.’ Zweig himself ...”

“... Beaverbrook and considered indispensable by Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The First World War had established him as a ‘press lord’, controlling the Express empire, as well as a member of the coalition cabinet. Soon Lady Diana herself would take the Beaver’s shilling and write a column in the Sunday Express until the editor managed to suppress ...”

“... that nothing surprised me.’ The exception, and rather different in genre, is ‘Incidents of War’, a sort of scrapbook memoir of soldiers’ written and spoken words in the years 1915-17, when Forster was in Alexandria as a Red Cross searcher; it shows a reach into areas of experience he was not to touch on elsewhere in his writings. Altogether 28 ...”

“... The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the pirates’ patron), Charles I and, not least, Oliver Cromwell. The ...”

“... government of 1936-37. Already a prominent writer and government lawyer before the First World War, he led the French Socialists (officially called the French Section of the Workers’ International) for most of the interwar period. And he achieved his success despite appearing to French gentiles more conspicuously Jewish than nearly all other prominent ...”

“... reads like Haddad’s code for 'fictionalise'. Otherwise, this smells like a set-up. Hasn’t the war in Iraq and its limitless dark fallout put paid to the sentiment of do-goodism and conventional notions of ‘truth’ and the ‘power of words’, particularly America-inspired ones? Rasa’s reflections come in a scene, early on, when he is trying to ...”

“... made to European civilisation by Can’t and Mendelzone’. Perhaps it was the old, lazy, upper-class way with Continental culture (Christ Church rather than Balliol speaking); perhaps it was Hailsham’s own insistence upon drawing attention to himself. The thin and rhetorical passages to be found here in Lord Hailsham’s memoirs about the infinite ...”

“... The most frightening of these concerns the Thursday immediately before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in June 1967, when Brown briefly found himself in charge of the Government in Wilson’s absence. Having successfully deputised at Prime Minister’s Questions, he made his way to the terrace of the Commons, where he encountered me. ‘You,’ he screeched in ...”