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“... than with Stalin, who responded unenthusiastically when, in personal meetings during the war, Churchill and Beaverbrook extolled Maisky’s performance as ambassador. Praise from capitalist ruling circles was a dubious benefit for a Soviet diplomat, suggesting as it did that the diplomat had gone native. In a way this was true of Maisky, although the ...”

“... Foreign Legion? In the months before his death, in 1991, was he really being investigated for a war crime? Did MI6 finance his first business in order to recruit Soviet scientists? Was he a KGB asset? Did he have a financial relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? ‘He has done more for Israel than can be said here today,’ Yitzhak Shamir said at his ...”

“... on 24 November 1917 from Breslau prison, where she had been held because of her opposition to the war, she praised Kautsky for still holding on to the ‘groping, searching, anxious’ young woman inside her – Kautsky was 53 at the time. When Kautsky visited Luxemburg in prison in May, her inner torment, her ‘restless, dissatisfied searching’ had been ...”

“... celebrated for his flamboyant, scandalous love-life and his nationalist posturing, the First World War poet-soldier who helped create the rhetoric and culture of Italian Fascism. Much of his work is virtually unreadable today, while an impressive body of lyric verse has been obscured by the behaviour that won him so much notoriety during his lifetime. A ...”

“... the new designation caught on, English doctors recognised the malaria of Italy as a member of the class of intermittent fevers that was kin to – and perhaps the same as – the agues known to afflict the inhabitants of the Fenlands and the coastal and estuarine marshes of Kent and Essex.There were all sorts of creeping, crawling, flying and buzzing insects ...”

“... for any of the things that posterity believes went wrong on his watch. In the case of the American War of Independence, in Roberts’s trenchant words: ‘Just as George cannot be blamed for the war breaking out, therefore, neither can he be blamed for losing it.’ Fifty years ago, Brooke went even further: We may be ...”

“... When, shortly before the Second World War, Freya Stark was asked by a publisher if she would write Gertrude Bell’s biography, she turned the idea down. Although she admired her famous predecessor as a fine traveller and considered Amurath to Amurath one of the best travel books she’d read, Freya was not ‘very fascinated by her as a woman ...”

“... its own world’. The Symmeses’ esoteric interests faded as they settled into lives of middle-class rectitude, but their ‘pot and pantheism’ was a powerful influence on Duncan: ‘It was not a dogma nor was it a magic that I understood for myself … but I understood that the meanings of life would always be, as they were in childhood, hidden away, in ...”

“... that stingy and treacherous little reptile, weeping his crocodile tears. I didn’t read much post-war Nichols, although I couldn’t resist his attack on Somerset Maugham in 1966. I was, however, fairly easily persuaded to review this book – largely to find out if there was more to the prolific and once enormously popular Beverley than whimsical humour and ...”

“... being of humble origins, would shrink at the sight of a policeman, whereas to people of Ford’s class policemen were servants you sent to fetch a cab when it rained. The gentleman business wasn’t all talk, however. Quite unnecessarily, since he was 41, he volunteered for the Army in 1915 and served in the trenches as an infantry officer. He may have ...”

“... and consequence-free sex, the period of royal mystery was brief, helped by the fact that a large war was going on for much of the time, when the intimate doings of the royal family may not have been uppermost in people’s minds. Reading the reissue of The Little Princesses, a simpler explanation for what Wilson calls the ‘cocoon of unknowability’ comes ...”

“... Tibetan lamas. When he urged his credulous followers to flee to South America to escape World War Three, and many sold all their belongings to settle in Uruguay, Chile and Brazil, a certain scepticism began to set in, especially since P.B. himself did not make the move. (He later claimed to have been in Australia, beaming peaceful thoughts in the ...”

“... the author had been her pupil and had given it to her just before the outbreak of the First World War. She – the diarist – was about twenty-one then. Not long afterwards, she went as a nurse to the Serbian front, where she died or, in Hug-Hellmuth’s words, ‘fell victim to the overwhelming onrush of events’. In 1915 Hug-Hellmuth showed the diary to ...”

“... question of how far Red terror was the result of grassroots militants settling scores with the ‘class enemy’. The research of social historians of the Russian Revolution, such as Diane Koenkov, S.A. Smith and Ronald Suny, has shown that the Bolshevik leadership in and immediately after 1917 was not only more susceptible to pressure from the masses than ...”

“... not ‘universal truth, but the machinery of universal application in the discovery of a certain class of truths ... I do not assign any universality to economic dogmas. It is not a body of concrete truth, but an engine for the discovery of concrete truth.’ Unfortunately, monetarists are dogmatists, and, politically at least, they have triumphed. In the ...”