“... had any significance, he said the inhabitants of a Catholic country – as I write the remains of John Paul II are doing the local rounds, Pátzcuaro this afternoon, Morelia this evening – should know the answer to the question, and then added a gloss to the effect that God took six days to make the mess we live in, and ...”

“... more extraordinary that armed forces maintain impetus to attack despite heavy casualty rates. John Terraine’s The Right of the Line, a comprehensive, judicious and humane account of the RAF’s experience in the last European war, gives sympathetic attention to the stress experienced by aircrews in Bomber Command, which realised as time went on that men ...”

“... like it, and it’s all completely secret.’ We were joined by a man in his late twenties called John, with long curly hair and very blue eyes. He said: ‘Bush looked good today. He just talked to reporters at the White House and he was really on a roll. Speaking extemporaneously for a few minutes at a time. He’s good at that kind of back and forth. It ...”

“... time.) Out on parole and divorced from his first wife – she’d dumped him over the drugs – he took up with a clingy, bouffant-haired Filipina cocktail waitress called Diane, whom he married in 1957. (He wasn’t in love with her, he confesses. She was dumb and slovenly: ‘Diane – the Great Zeeeero.’ ‘I just wanted to have chicks I could ball when I ...”

“... to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like John Toland. He believes in a ‘legal limited monarchy’, and has a humane idea of consensus and national unity within such an arrangement. He is an active, adept pragmatist, a revolutionary moderate. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe speaks of Crusoe’s ‘life of ...”

“... sensation I had was of never being quite right. As I have said before in these pages, it took me about fifty years to become accustomed to, or more exactly to feel less uncomfortable with, ‘Edward’, a foolishly English name yoked to the unmistakably Arabic family name ‘Said’. True, ‘Edward’ was for the Prince of Wales who cut so fine a ...”

“... Only six people would be there, and no electric light. That afternoon – it was a Saturday – we took the children to the pantomime. This year it was The Snow Queen. She was coldly glittery, and swirled around the stage in a platinum cloak with her comic entourage of ravens and spiders. The heroes were a boy and a brave, north-travelling girl. At one point ...”

“... The admission of a professing Jew to Westminster would have occurred sooner or later: that it took place when it did, Dr Alderman writes, was due to a realisation of the potential usefulness of the Jews at the polls. ‘The Whig/Liberal connection wanted votes, and allowed itself to be seduced by the allure of Jewish votes.’ It is at some point during ...”

“... was deliberately allowed by Chiang Kai-shek; the most famous battle of the Long March never took place; Mao attacked India in 1962 with the support of the Soviet Union.Other scoops have important implications for Mao’s character. He poisoned a rival during the Yan’an period. He would send his own soldiers to be massacred if it would help him to move ...”

“... aspect; not for him another shared bottle in El Vino’s (‘Yes, why not?’) before the 8.10 took him home to Farnham. Why waste time drinking with the people from whom he was ‘least likely to glean information’? By ‘information’ Pincher means the stuff governments want to keep private. The encomia at his memoir’s start evoke a picture of him ...”

“... tandem’. When did ‘decade-ism’ – history as wine gums – start? The first decades that took a retrospective grip on the popular imagination were the 1890s and the 1920s. It may not be a coincidence that both have been characterised as fun-loving eras that chucked out staid manners and stale customs, whose social revolutionaries were libertines (Mae ...”

“... educated and the heirs of the Philosophes, looked like a more enlightened way of ordering things took on a very different appearance when it was a matter of enforcing vertu by requisitioning grain or putting an end to practices that were not supposed to exist but always had done. Anyone who might be tempted to interpret such conflicts in terms of ideology or ...”

“... stories, the rituals more than games or gestures? Must we really suppose that the Greeks always took these funny things seriously? The important issue concerns the mental attitudes, the beliefs and the feelings, which lie beneath and explain the behavioural facade. That, in brief, is the problem of interpretation, and our whole understanding of Greek ...”

“... which disguises rather than describes what goes on. His way of mocking this obfuscatory language took many forms. The simplest was to get words deliberately wrong, and allow the commentary to continue none the less. Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling was usually the fall-guy: INTERVIEWER: Sir Arthur, where did you strat your work? SIR ARTHUR: I think it can be ...”

“... your cock out, with no shame, as I have done’ than it was to follow orders.Ion Antonescu, who took control of the Romanian state in September 1940, oversaw the deaths of more than 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma. The pogrom in Bucharest, led by the Iron Guard, saw Jews tortured and skinned alive, their bodies hung from butchers’ hooks in a twisted ...”