“... tells us, he remains committed. But given what the deterrent means to the country’s political class – the international standing they imagine it gives them – it is unlikely that a Cameron government would do away with it, whatever the expense.If value for money is the concern, Cameron could easily take an axe to the whole Home Office apparatus, whose ...”

“... panache, style, oratory and wit, but no one who was a mediocrity could have governed Britain in war and peace through 15 of the most difficult and turbulent years in the country’s history, nor is there any reason to regard the bishops whom he created as notably second-rate. There is, however, another reason for his dim reputation. As Professor Gash points ...”

“... of 1955, in which 39 Egyptians died, a direct cause of the escalation which led to the 1956 Suez War. Sharret’s diaries also give details of Israeli plans to take over Gaza and the West Bank in the early 1950s, and to establish a Maronite puppet-state in Lebanon at least fifteen years before the Palestinians became a political factor in that country. In ...”

“... the authors hint that he even set a rival up for assassination. Sources quoted in Man of War, Man of Peace? describe Adams as ‘akin to a Nazi’, a racketeering criminal thug’, ‘a fundamentalist’. No misdemeanour is overlooked: he was an indifferent student, enjoys the occasional lie-in with his wife and may have dyed his beard. If Sharrock ...”

“... pick their way with caution. There had indeed been a disaster, Robb concludes: the Hundred Years War. This is a point scored against the baggage-train approach to history, according to which the war is long over. Estienne’s Guide itself makes no reference to it, but historical sources rarely make explicit reference to ...”

“... to the Journal when it was first published, Barbellion was a product of ‘that most unfortunate class, the poor educated, who live lives of worry in straitened circumstances’. Instead of going to university, he earned his keep on a local paper, where his father worked. Later, he came to regret not making more of journalism, but at the time he’d rather ...”

“... is the full justification of it to reason.’In the years immediately preceding the Civil War, Douglass continued to advocate a violent response to the Fugitive Slave Act and to slavery itself, skewering pacifist abolitionists and their futile ambition to ‘frown slave holders down’. Blight argues persuasively that Douglass’s manicheanism was ...”

“... student crew to Greece. He agreed; they left in June and Collingwood came back only shortly before war was declared. In 1940, his account of the journey, The First Mate’s Log, appeared from OUP. This frenetic activity was not typical of Collingwood’s life up to that point. True, he was always an insomniac workaholic, but he had lived undemonstratively, and ...”

“... College, Oxford, whom Lord Milner summoned or took with him to rebuild South Africa after the Boer War. With their mission completed by the foundation of the Union of South Africa, they returned to England but maintained some cohesion by starting a quarterly review, The Round Table, dedicated to turning the British Empire into an organic union; and they ...”

“... and Dick were now the only two things that really mattered.’ He then survived the First World War, in which, as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, he had been so badly wounded in the Battle of the Somme that his commanding officer wrote a letter of condolence to his parents and his death was announced in the Times (the paper was decent enough to ...”

“... of her sister Laura, of whose death we learn in the very first sentence: ‘Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.’ It is part of the business of the novel to discover why Laura died. Iris and Laura grew up the daughters of a conscientious manufacturer who had inherited the estate, wealth and power of a successful ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”