“... so long awaited! – to expand without limits.’ In his 1882 lecture ‘What is a nation?’, Ernest Renan said that ‘forgetting, and I daresay historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation.’ Reinventing a nation, too, requires historical licence.The writing of the War Memoirs was itself a political act, because it aided de ...”

“... trips to Kew, Clerkenwell, days trawling the internet, established a connection. Hadman E. was Ernest. From Stilton. A railwayman in Peterborough, an ‘acting porter’, Ernest died on the Somme in 1917 and is listed on the Thiepval Memorial. There was indeed a remote kinship with Anna. Her great-great-grandfather and ...”

“... the counting was over, he annulled the election and appointed a puppet government headed by Chief Ernest Shonekan, a lacklustre businessman of limited political experience, to take over from him when he stepped down in August, as previously agreed. Last but not least, he retired all the generals with the exception of Abacha, his second-in-command, whom he ...”

“... delusions. When Flaubert and the Revue de Paris were put on trial in 1857, the prosecutor, Ernest Pinard, leaped on this sentence: ‘The platitudes of marriage versus the poetry of adultery! On the one hand there is the soiling of marriage, on the other the platitudes, but also always the poetry of adultery. Such, gentlemen, are the situations which ...”

“... are not better than they were before the ceasefire. They are worse.’ Roddy Doyle’s Ireland may (O’Brien admits) look different to outsiders, and be notable for an absence of ‘wild Serbs or furious Croats’. Be not deceived. Just beneath this secular and European veneer dwells the ancestral dark: ‘God Land is in there, deep down. It whispers to ...”

“... index to The Gathering Storm (‘Baldwin, Stanley ... confesses putting party before country’) may not have survived as an objective historical judgment, but even fifty years on, Britain’s preparations for the Second World War hardly look inspiring. The next long spell of Tory government in the Fifties saw Britain’s conventional forces run down without ...”

“... in some transfigured form). The volume to hand, however, suggests 1) that the idea of the CD-ROM may be more subversive and exciting than its still impoverished reality, encaged in its plastic frame, and 2) that the ‘book’ may well be better exploded, if I can put it that way, by the stimulation and vigorous ...”

“... own media-infested homes. ‘Time and space – time to be alone, space to move about – these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow.’ This prediction by the naturalist Edwin Way Teale seems both prescient and poignant. We already live in a world in which time to be alone and space to move about are attainable by the rich perhaps, but a matter ...”

“... We’ve​ got form, Michael Gove and I. ‘Richard Evans may hold a professorship,’ he told the Daily Mail in 2014, after I had attacked him for claiming that Britain had fought the First World War for democracy, ‘but these arguments, like the interpretations of Oh! What a Lovely War! and Blackadder, are more reflective of the attitude of an undergraduate cynic playing to the gallery in a Cambridge Footlights revue rather than a sober academic contributing to a proper historical debate ...”

“... belatedly proclaimed, of the European past. This last point, on which Douglas strongly insists, may provoke some opposition. For example, she says more than once that Hemingway proved to be a better writer about the war than Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon, even though they saw a lot more fighting than he did, precisely because he was not, as they ...”

“... Ill-health had only recently forced him to step down as Chancellor. Along with Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison, he had incontrovertibly been one of the cornerstones of the postwar Labour Government. Indeed, from 1947 he was not only the executive force directing its strategy for economic recovery but also the public face of ...”

“... also to be prepared to assert that my elephant is coloured. One is a reason for the other. It may also happen that someone calls on me to justify – to give a reason for – my original assertion. If I can show that I am entitled to the commitment I have undertaken, I come to have a further normative status. Successful communication requires that we all ...”

“... or determinist version of the past’. Where did Attlee’s socialism come from? Unlikely as it may seem, Bew argues convincingly that it came from America, from the futuristic utopian fiction of Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backward (1887). In Bellamy’s novel a resident of late 19th-century Boston is hypnotised and doesn’t wake up until the year ...”

“... 1. The concept of sovereignty may refer to the political control that a leader exercises over a society and territory, or the psychic control that an individual exercises over herself. 2. Sovereignty has a long history in political thought, not least in relation to the expansion of European imperial powers. But it was in Spanish America that its modern form – applied to non-imperial or non-colonial nation states – was first put into effective use as a diplomatic norm ...”

“... blackboard. One axis represents the usual political spectrum, with MacDonald, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin on the left, Baldwin on the soft right and Churchill on the hard right. But then I bifurcate it with another axis, which differentiates leaders and parties by their attitude towards state intervention. At times of acute global crisis ...”