“... One of the principal problems of the warring generals was an inability to agree on strategy. At David Owen’s insistence, the Alliance’s election objectives were limited to achieving the balance of power. This had the apparent advantage of modest realism, but there were more substantial disadvantages. The first of these – as I can report by taking a ...”

“... campaign, in Sicily and then in Italy – Monty was nominally subordinate to Alexander. He held Alexander’s ability in low esteem, and Hamilton’s passages about Monty and Alexander are as explicit and persuasive as anything here. He quotes Monty in Italy: ‘Alexander is a very great friend of mine, and I am very fond of him. But I am under no ...”

“... politics that it can be hard to take it seriously. Indeed, taking it seriously is sometimes held to be a sign of political immaturity, or worse still, just more hypocrisy. We know that politicians can’t possibly sustain all the absurd contortions we demand of them as the price for securing our votes. In such circumstances, to insist that democratic ...”

“... the inaugural Wilding Festival at St George’s Bloomsbury, where Davison’s memorial service was held.1 Emily Wilding Davison was born in 1872 in a substantial house in Greenwich, the middle daughter of her speculator father’s second marriage. She was red-haired and liked sweets; her pet name at home was Weet Weet. At the age of 19 she won a scholarship ...”

“... to own them. Most country boys who moved to the cities in mid-19th-century England must never have held a gun in their hands. So disarmament may in part have been a consequence of the Game Laws. In Norfolk and Suffolk in 1970 there was one shotgun certificate for every eight households. Had the countryside been reamed since the Game Laws were reformed in ...”

“... In most parts of the Holy Roman Empire, the Carolina Criminal Code promulgated by Charles V held good into the 17th century. It prescribed the death penalty not just for murder and treason, but for arson, blasphemy, counter-feiting, conjuring, witchcraft, abortion, rape, unnatural sex, highway robbery, robbery or attempted robbery with violence, and a ...”

“... will allow, by the genius loci of the islands:     Perennial emblem painted on the shield Held up to cow a never-conquered land Fast in the little General’s fragile hand. The method of Marshall’s book – to deal in turn with the facts of Orkney life, the island, the farm, the estate, the church, the school, and relate them where possible to the ...”

“... believe that the post-war years were in fact a time when nationalistic-technocratic assumptions held sway, even – perhaps especially – in ...”

“... and other forms of topographical literature. The reproductive print trade in its various branches held out the promise of considerable financial rewards, particularly for specialists able to churn out masses of acceptably finished views in a short space of time, but this kind of hack-work could hardly claim the status of a liberal or dignified art. In this ...”

“... books, an old-fashioned resource. It is one of the ironies of literary history that a book widely held to be a danger to young people when it was first published is itself an inquiry into the effects of compulsive reading. Here is a passage from Werther’s first letter, reflecting his enthusiasm for a place new to him on an early summer’s day: Solitude in ...”

“... with the Angry Brigade believed that ministers, policemen and other people in power should be held personally responsible for their actions (hence the bombs planted at their homes). Finally, where the Marxist parties blamed the failure of May 1968 on a lack of coherent revolutionary leadership (and aspired to provide it), the thinking of the libertarian ...”

“... Opposed to them were the Jansenists (after a 17th-century Flemish bishop, Cornelius Jansen), who held that a radically sinful humanity could hope for salvation only if God chose to bestow his ‘efficacious grace’ on them. Unlike Protestants, to whose beliefs on the subject of grace they strayed perilously close, the Jansenists had no desire to break with ...”

“... the corridor of Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), where Bertha Mason is held captive behind a small black door. More frightening, I’d say, because a lot cannier, is the one on the upper floor of a village inn in Mary E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). The scheming protagonist ventures along it in search of the room ...”

“... adhered to a position and not to an individual. The respect in which Revolutionary symbols were held is indicated by their use on more than one occasion to control angry crowds . But appearances were more than a matter of policing. They were a means of marking, symbolically, the shift from the old to the new, but were also assumed to have transformative ...”

“... to bring back Israel’s three captured soldiers (believing, mistakenly, that all of them are held by Hizbullah – an error that shows how sketchy his knowledge of Israeli affairs is). But it was what he said about Jerusalem that was scandalous. No Palestinian, no Arab, no Muslim will make peace with Israel if the Haram-al-Sharif compound (also known as ...”