“... Since the Second World War, the cutting edge of English historical studies has been not ‘world history’ but English local history, a fact by no means adequately reflected in the Report of the National Curriculum History Working Group, nor even in the menus of courses currently on offer in university history departments ...”

“... has been an English Chekhov. That mocking analyst of the historical failure and inertia of his own class was turned, in the English theatre, into a charming chronicler of whimsicality and eccentricity. This analytic and teaching dramatist is detached from his specific intelligence and viewpoint, and is then all tough talk and open stagecraft. In one ...”

“... as a musician: she was about to go to Vienna, to study under Schönberg, when the First World War broke out. When her father died, leaving her, as she put it, ‘mutilated’, she saw that it would be better to earn her own living than stay in the country and quarrel with her mother. She came to London, and worked as an editor on the monumental Tudor ...”

“... affair. Julian Haviland, Anthony Bevins and Philip Webster of the Times would all pass with first-class honours any finals examination in Belgrano Studies: but as members of the House of Commons Lobby, they necessarily have to give their attention to every ephemeral political event and could not devote themselves to the intricacies of 30 April-2 May ...”

“... to maintain. These triremes won Greece the Persian Wars and lost Athens the Peloponnesian War, after its Sicilian expedition ended in a naval debacle. Triremes seem to have enjoyed a continuous history into late antiquity, but after the death of Alexander the Great, the kings and kinglets who competed for his legacy began to build much bigger ...”

“... of Eastern Europe, preparing for a research trip to East Berlin while grieving for his working-class communist father, is grazed by a car on Abbey Road. He is involved with a glamorous young art student called Jennifer Moreau, whom he took to his father’s funeral a few weeks before, and who has shown up with a stepladder so that they can re-create the ...”

“... November, 2004 – about half the number killed by aerial attack on London during the Second World War. Roberts’s figures have been criticised on two grounds: that he multiplied up from a random sample of population clusters to get a figure for the whole country, and that the people in the clusters his team interviewed were not representative of the nation ...”

“... through from outside. He took grim satisfaction from France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which he blamed on the incompetence of the chiefs of staff. He deplored the bribery and ballot-rigging which made a mockery of the new ‘democratic’ elections, and stood firm, but alone, against the forces of reaction. He also had misfortune to ...”

“... hope then, in which differences wash away. In this way, and to the consternation of a certain class of cultural crusader for Afrikaans, English may yet assume a central, even critical role in the making of a new, transcendent national identity. Yet becoming detached from one’s ‘ethnic roots’ involves processes every bit as complex and worthy of ...”

“... over other professional men. It was not possible to denigrate these men as ignorant, lower-class or foreign; even the experts in magic were not the crones found in literature but respected men. Behind the image of rational Greek man – an image promoted by élite Greek literature as well as its later élite commentators – was a culture that ...”

“... of progress’. Yet contemporaries compared the gravity of this situation to that of the Great War, and its consequence was, in Stuart Ball’s words, ‘a reshaping of the party system, and a new basis in the pattern of issues, which was to hold sway for the following fifty years’. The difficulties of 1929 to 1931 were of three kinds ...”

“... despair led to the Palestine question being transferred to the UN at the end of the Second World War. The UN was a very young and inexperienced organisation in those days, and the people it appointed to find a solution to the conflict were at a loss where to begin or how to proceed. The Jewish Agency gladly filled the vacuum, exploiting Palestinian disarray ...”

“... west of Chelmsford. There he and his family remained, heads down, for the duration of the Civil War. Following a similar logic, a three-storey-deep indestructible bunker was built between 1952 and 1953 at Kelvedon Hatch, where it remained in readiness throughout the most heated episodes of the Cold War. From 1961 it was a ...”

“... that the [British] government wanted kept secret,’ writes Michael Goodman of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. And yet Pincher believes he never threatened the security of the state – that would be the work of a traitor, which is the way he described Snowden in a recent television interview. But if he wasn’t a bean-spiller in ...”

“... atrocities happen every day, in places presumed to be ‘safe’ as well as those beset by civil war. The Brothers provides essential Soviet and post-Soviet geopolitical background, charting the Tsarnaev family’s peregrinations from Kyrgyzstan (to where Stalin brutally transplanted the entire Chechen population in 1944) to Novosibirsk in south central ...”