“... Bell’, in reference to the superefficient German generalissimo of the Great War. Her son Quentin, born in 1910, contributes a charming brief memoir which recalls a frequent device employed by his mother when answering the London telephone.   ‘Museum 5596.’   ‘Can I speak to Mrs Bell?’   ‘I am afraid Mrs Bell is ...”

“... great intellect or great oddity. Few moments have more become the House of Commons since the war than the speech of Enoch Powell in the early hours of 28 July 1959 on the scandalous deaths of Kikuyu prisoners at Hola camp in Kenya. It was delivered with precision of language, in ordered sequence and with what the present author calls ‘an incandescent ...”

“... that they were liable, in the words of one academic, to be ‘undermined by anecdote’. ‘In the war against poverty, poverty won.’ said Ronald Reagan. American conservatives argued that government welfare programmes created a whole set of ‘perverse incentives’ which, directly or indirectly, actually made things worse. This thesis was popularised in ...”

“... north in the spring of 1803, calamity struck. Margaret and the baby were taken ill in Florence, war broke out again between Britain and France, and there were anguished discussions in the English colony about how to get home. ‘Ransoms were speculated upon – chains and dungeons glanced at – gentlemen went off in disguise at the peril of their lives ...”

“... to his sexual orientation: as a teenager, he began to realise that he was gay. In wartime and post-war France, that was a predicament: it harrowed Foucault to the point of attempted suicide until he met his lifelong lover Daniel Defert. In 1959, it even got him expelled from a teaching post in Poland after meeting a boy who turned out to be a Communist police ...”

“... more specifically, the sort of view that Germans associated with English gentlemen, an admired class of persons who could not help but patronise everything outside their own immediate circle, even though they were great travellers and took a keen interest in other peoples. I saw what he meant, and he suddenly smiled and said, ‘Greenmantle, you ...”

“... have had to be omitted.’ On Jane Austen: ‘She is as critical of the current practice of her class as she is admiring of the ethical theory that sustains it.’ On Scott: ‘Revolution is more genuinely his subject than Scotland is.’ On Byron: ‘Byron now succeeded Scott as the most fashionable author of the day, and he did so because his ...”

“... novel’, more generally the humorist-humanist vein of embattled liberalism in post-war British fiction. He is a familiar face on the TV arts circuit, a familiar voice in the literary press. He has stood on both sides of the fence in the Booker stakes, being chairman of the judges in 1981 and a short-listed nominee (for Rates of Exchange) in ...”

“... of the Party: they shared with Russia all they had themselves put into fighting the Germans in the war. Colonel Lev Ovisishcher, one of Shcharansky’s fellow martyrs, was an ex-pilot and political commissar, who had gone up in a small plane with a megaphone at Stalingrad, to try to urge the Germans to surrender. Martin Gilbert’s account of Shcharansky’s ...”

“... husband was called ‘Bror’. He is mentioned only twice in the book, unnamed: ‘When the war broke out, my husband and the two Swedish assistants on the farm volunteered and went down to the German border ... My husband wrote and instructed me to load up four ox-wagons.’ Tommy and Cockie don’t appear in the book at all. Not all the old ...”

“... of rebels, and the incarceration of dissidents in penal colonies. He presents the American War of Independence as essentially a land grab. Behind the rhetoric of republicanism and fiscal autonomy lay the desire to deal with the Native Americans without interference: George Washington is described archly as ‘the castigator of the Native ...”

“... of the final, most troubling stage of his career. In the years leading up to the Second World War motorsport had became heavily politicised. Just after the Nazis came to power in 1933 Hitler opened the Berlin motor show with a speech in which he announced tax cuts for car owners, an ambitious plan to build autobahns across the country, and to develop what ...”

“... Musab al-Zarqawi, denounces the Shia as apostates. There are also near daily massacres of working-class Shias. Now the Shias have started to strike back. The bodies of Sunnis are being found in rubbish dumps across Baghdad. ‘I was told in Najaf by senior leaders that they have killed upwards of a thousand Sunnis,’ an Iraqi official said. Often the killers ...”

“... and trusted ‘acolyte’, he vehemently denies that a film they worked on during the Second World War, The Molander Case, was ever shot. Afterwards, the presenter is furious that ‘this ancient shithead’ with ‘half his marbles’ has been allowed on the show. But Wilzek, only half-aware of what a disaster it has been (‘I remember something without ...”

“... weapons of mass destruction. Benn did not believe the situation justified a military response. ‘War is easy to talk about,’ he said. There are not many people left of the generation which remembers it … I was in London during the Blitz in 1940, living [in Westminster] … Every night, I went to the shelter in Thames House. Every morning, I saw ...”