“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... politics before this; few of them had been on previous marches. I asked about the 2003 Stop the War march: ‘I was 11,’ they said: ‘I was 13 or 14.’ Everyone has plenty of reasons for being there: they want Malcolm Grant, the provost, to reverse his enthusiastic position on tuition fees, or to bring his £424,000 salary down in line with Oxford and ...”

“... to diamond ring emojis’. Can our heroine bring herself to want that, a complete melding with the class that enslaved hers? For her boyfriend’s father, the Harry-Meghan marriage is ‘inspiring stuff’, but for her? ‘I knew these were the things to want, the right things to reach for. But I felt sick of reaching, enduring. Of 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 ...”