“... your elders.’Religious education became a focus of reform. Parish priests were ordered to hold a class at least once every six weeks. Children were expected to know the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed in English; instead of the Ave Maria, a prayer of grace, they learned the Ten Commandments, a list of rules. Godparents were deputised to ensure that ...”

“... be happy always’ but warned against eating too much of it, lest ‘you die of happiness’.Class was a greater divide than gender when it came to medieval ideas about health. Only the wealthiest could afford physicians, whose sensible health regimens were all written for noble patrons. Rich and poor were even thought to have different dietary ...”

“... the trend. With the aid of shaky cue-cards and overemphatic announcers, Eisenhower sells his own war record next to a fear about other people’s: FIRST ANNOUNCER: The man from Abilene. Out of the heartland of America, out of this small frame house in Abilene, Kansas, came a man, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Through the crucial hour of historic D-Day, he brought ...”

“... that outright annexation would provoke rival empires to counter-annexations, touching off World War One in Kow-loon instead of Sarajevo. Why 99 years? Because a lease needs a date. Why did the Qing dynasty sign? Because its last hope lay in getting foreign help against its own people, and it was ready to sign anything. The lease was never ratified, no rent ...”

“... the obedience of the organised clinching the apathy of the disorganised. But the new political class in the Soviet Union today is not confined to the area of leaders and demonstrators active in civil society: it also includes the younger cadres of the state, who follow public affairs no less passionately than their counterparts in the electoral arena, from ...”

“... productivity, he writes: ‘I am hard pressed to argue, as I did in the 1960s, that the post-Civil War subsidised rails from the Mississippi to the West Coast were a wholly bad idea.’ The same flirtation with activist-state liberalism is evident in his discussion of the ‘extensive technical training of our military during the ...”

“... Games is a story of violence not intruding from without, but erupting from within an affluent class that is more precisely observed in the Austrian than in the American version. And Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, two talented actors, render the wife and husband more sympathetic, more endearing, than they are in the Austrian version. Why should it be ...”

“... heading away from the overcast politics of the industrialised countries in search of a ‘messiah class’, as he explains in Praised Be Our Lords: the peasantries and otherwise exploited communities of ‘colonial and semi-colonial’ countries. His own Adoration took place in Bolivia, where he stumbled on the manger in all its simplicity: the tin mines of ...”

“... assets fall into the hands of businessmen close to the top junta leaders: the result will be a class of oligarchs similar to Russia’s. The outside world meanwhile seems to be banking on engagement leading to reform; but if it doesn’t, the Obama administration has no back-up plan, or none that one can see. Chinese diplomats, worried that the junta is ...”

“... latter was given to the Netherlands when the Swedes failed to pay). After the First World War came Spain, Czechoslovakia, the US, Greece and Austria and the site was expanded across the canal to incorporate the gardens of Sant’Elena. Following a hiatus from 1943 to 1947 (Mussolini’s 1942 Biennale, dedicated to military art but not mentioning the ...”

“... was a French patriot, a Catholic, an archaeologist and a sharpshooter in the Franco-Prussian War. They were married to the engineer and archaeologist Marcel-Auguste Dieulafoy and together the couple undertook a number of expeditions to Persia. Their ‘common dress’ reflected their common interests (one journalist wrote that Dieulafoy’s male attire ...”

“... Rubin, went to Radcliffe College when she was 16, ‘one of three Jewish women in her freshman class’, Robins says, ‘and the only one to admit being so’. She met Lionel Trilling in 1927 and married him two years later. She had hopes of being a singer, but two thyroid operations wrecked her vocal cords, and she turned to writing. She wrote a regular ...”

“... writings, which introduced Herzen to Anglo-American readers, he came to resemble a pragmatic Cold War liberal rather than a revolutionary socialist. Berlin’s portrait (or self-portrait) has stood largely unaltered for more than half a century. Herzen’s work has not had consistent backing inside or outside academia, on the left or on the right, and Aileen ...”

“... Saddam was the very price demanded by the Iranians as a precondition for parley in the last Gulf War. Most Americans are still unsure of how to distinguish between Hussein of Jordan and the Beast of Baghdad (or is it the Butcher of Basra? The Brute of Babylon?) – a distinction which led the New York Times to run a special article on Arabic nomenclature. In ...”

“... assumed to be part of Greater Russia. The Balts are setting out to treat them as the second-class, lower-cultured citizens the Balts always thought they were; the Central Asians see them as Christian oppressors. Christian Armenians prosecute a war in the Caucasus which they define almost as holy: as the struggle of a ...”