“... Bagration, the epitome of dash and colour, whose mortal wounding at Borodino was deeply mourned by Tsar, people and army alike. Instead he was immensely thorough, cautious and intensely professional. Nor did he enjoy the mystique of the veteran Kutusov, detested by the Tsar and with the stigma of Austerlitz on his ...”

“... In 1934 I came to Oxford from Edinburgh, where I had obtained my first degree. I found the place to be full of left-wing political feeling. The rise of Hitler had provoked many hitherto non-political young people to agitated concern about the future of Europe. The developing policy of appeasement; the ‘non-intervention’ policy of the British and French governments with respect to the Franco rebellion in Spain; the helpless feeling that the humane liberal traditions in which so many of us had been brought up were dangerously threatened: all of this had us seriously worried ...”

“... Most British​ prime ministers since Margaret Thatcher have wanted to be Thatcher in one way or another. Tony Blair hoped to emulate not just the longevity of her tenure but also the impact she had on the country. Cameron would have liked to remake the Conservative Party in his own image, as she remade it in hers ...”

“... of two million. Labour leaders like Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald were traitors who should be ‘shot at dawn’. Readers were urged to wage a ‘blood feud’ against Germans living in Britain: ‘You cannot naturalise an unnatural beast – a human abortion – a hellish freak. But you can exterminate it.’ Bottomley went around the country giving ...”

“... east, and Protestantism to the west. Internally divided, it was in the process of being recaptured by the new religious orders of the Counter-Reformation (the Jesuits arrived in 1606, the Capuchins in 1616, the Ursulines in 1626); while at the same time Richelieu was planning to destroy the town’s castle, thus turning its citizens into subjects of the ...”

“... universe. Donald McCrory’s new biography, pious in tone and lumpishly written, could hardly be more different. Humboldt was part of a great flowering of German intellectual life in the decades either side of 1800, the period when Germaine de Staël called Germany the land of poets and thinkers. Quite a few of the writers came in pairs, whether fathers ...”

“... century. The confessional conflicts, rebellions, plagues and famines of the 16th century were mild by comparison. ‘’Tis tru we have had many such black days in England in former ages,’ James Howell wrote in 1647, ‘but those parallel’d to the present are to the shadow of a mountain compar’d to the eclipse of the moon.’ In his Essay on the Customs ...”

“... virgin, more often partially domesticated. We leave our prints on it, our tracks, and used by generations these become a track, a trail, a trod, a path, a highway. Ever since my memory began I have followed such tracks with foot and eye: the stony, grassy drove roads along which herds and flocks travelled from Aberdeenshire to southern trysts and ...”

“... point to its cars, those Eisenhower-era Buicks and Oldsmobiles and Plymouths, held together by Cuban ingenuity and powered by Russian engines and other improvised innards. But on the Malecón, the grand boulevard along the Caribbean at the city’s northern edge, stands a row of other remnants from that era: battered ...”

“... the governing assumptions about intellectuals, but it doesn’t square with the facts. France may be a special case, especially France between the 1930s and the 1950s, but the British situation should be regarded as ‘one distinctive variant of a larger international pattern’. Germany, Russia, Italy and the United ...”

“... That’s the theory, though minute descriptions of naval repairs and battle strategy wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of husbandly billets-doux. But then again he is writing into a void, or near void: when a telegram comes from Sophie, it contains the single-word message ‘Well’. He isn’t tempted by the fleshpots of ...”

“... study, summarised in the Independent, which attempted to rank nations as more or less neurotic by measuring rates of suicide, crime, divorce and the consumption of alcohol and caffeine. The UK came out as the world’s eighth most stable, extroverted nation (just ahead of Germany), while Hungary and France ranked as the most neurotic and introverted. The ...”

“... MacDiarmid, was still crowing about this. As an established man of letters, he could afford to be wry about the story, but the fact that he tells it at all makes clear his own big-headedness – the great pleasure he took in the enormousness and occasional enormity of his ego – as well as his lifelong obsession with size and comparison. Norman ...”

“... compelled to list ‘Lolita complex’ in the index), and raised, with his wife, the child he had by the wife of one of his assistants. Then there were the children who never grew up: practical jokers like the brilliant Russian Lev Landau or the acid-tongued Wolfgang Pauli. They formed a tight-knit community. When not meeting at Bohr’s Institute for ...”

“... has chosen this moment to burgle the safe in the president’s office, and is caught redhanded by a secretary. As they struggle, she presses the button used to summon the janitor from his basement hutch. Gloomy already, Charlie doesn’t exactly jump to it. What follows is a brilliant pastiche of the race-to-the-rescue sequences D.W. Griffith pioneered in ...”