“... the unctuous ‘Empire-Lite’ of Michael Ignatieff and the ‘liberal imperialism’ peddled by Robert Cooper, one of Blair’s fly-by-night gurus. ‘Islamofascism’ seemed as evil as Nazism, Saddam Hussein was another Hitler, a generation-long battle loomed, and invocations of Winston Churchill – ‘the greatest’, according to Ferguson, ‘of all ...”

“... and very polite to each other; and are very polite again as soon as the quarrel is over. We may want to remember though what Proust says about nice people in a notebook: ‘In my novel, there is an ultra-bourgeois family, how many sick people in it?’ – ‘combien de malades dedans?’ What seems to have happened is that at the end of the episode of ...”

“... In Praised Be Our Lords, he quotes a letter he wrote from jail in 1969 to Philippe de Saint-Robert, a Gaullist of the left and the author of Le Jeu de la France, which he had just been reading. The letter was signed off by ‘an ordinary young Frenchman who, because he loves his country and its people, went to Bolivia. Everyone plays … in his own ...”

“... life. (As my parents had recently returned from a 22-year migration to Lancashire, the difference may have seemed sharper to them.)The Highland Clearances stood apart from the everyday experience of having relatives in Manchester, Queensland or Vancouver: the evictions and cottage-burnings of the previous century were a long way from the easy matter of ...”

“... has given the world three gifts: chemicals, debt and Joe Biden. Each promises great things but may deliver undesirable side effects. Until the 19th century Delaware’s primary crop was tobacco. Then a French Huguenot called Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, son of an adviser to Louis XVI, began manufacturing gunpowder on the Brandywine River, north of ...”

“... express the inexpressibleness of his matter’ (this was Agee’s own view). Trilling (and Agee) may have been right. But perhaps the opening pages, though touted as experimental, are actually closer to an extrapolation of Catholic ritual – the self-examination and confession of sin before Holy Communion (Agee was a Catholic). For he knows that he must ...”

“... to Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Documents, if genuine, show that she chaired the company. She may have been in a hurry but she did not wish to be seen taking the arm of a uniformed president. He was not prepared to forgive her past. The couple’s distaste for each other yielded to a mutual dependence on the United States. Neither party could say ...”

“... he was on a plane to Belgrade, although five years remained on his prison sentence. Radoman, who may have been flipped, becoming an informant for Serbian intelligence, or may even have been one all along, soon flew to Valencia, where he owned an apartment. When he got there, he found more than 200 kg of cocaine, stashed by ...”

“... court. In 1608, at the age of 32, he set out on the European journey which made his name. (It may have been the death of his father in the previous year that made this financially possible.) There was an element of the publicity stunt about it. Will Kemp, the comic, had morris-danced from London to Norwich in 1599 and published a book about it, Kemps Nine ...”

“... American confidence. These were the years in which Stanley Fischer, acting as itinerant bagman for Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, would disburse stand-by credits and loans from the IMF, in sovereign disregard of its statutes, according to the political value to Washington of incumbent regimes around the world. The two chief beneficiaries of his largesse ...”

“... dates. The first plans for the cemetery were drawn up in 1920 and finalised two years later by Sir Robert Lorimer, an architect inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement and Scottish baronial architecture – nostalgia to soothe the pain of modernity. Like most such cemeteries, it is overlooked by a Cross of Sacrifice – an elongated cross usually set on an ...”

“... off to found a new company, Shockley Semiconductor. And this is where his mother comes into it. May Bradford Shockley, who grew up in back-country Missouri, was the daughter of mining engineers; in 1904 she had become the only female deputy surveyor of minerals in the US. Her affection for Palo Alto – she had gone to university at Stanford – led her to ...”

“... kingdom in the Age of Discoveries. These contradictory emphases are never really reconciled. This may have something to do with the fact that some of the Hochkulturen often regarded as archetypes of the patrimonial state – Pharaonic Egypt or Shang China – are among the few major historical experiences Runciman bypasses in his survey. The exception is ...”

“... in a series of incidents that helped trigger the Civil War: events hauntingly recorded by Robert Payne, who was teaching at Lianda. Lung Yun, arrested and deported to Chungking, later escaped to Hong Kong. He ended his days, like Li Tsung-Jen, an honorific figure in the People’s Republic. In November 1937, as the Japanese swept the Nationalist ...”

“... to chair the SNC but was kept on a short leash, being re-elected only for three-month terms. By May 2012 he had abandoned his opposition to the militarisation of the anti-Assad movement, but then abruptly decided that his position had become untenable and resigned. On 11 November 2012 a new body to speak for the Syrian opposition abroad was established, the ...”