“... the Russians agreed to leave Hungary, clearing the way for free, multi-party elections. ‘We hope,’ he added, ‘that the West will help us in our struggle.’ But the West was not about to intervene; it was otherwise engaged. In America a Presidential election was a week away. And in the Middle East, Britain and France, together with Israel, were ...”

“... reform in a single phrase. Even these precautions – and the star ‘human interest’ turns by Christopher ‘Superman’ Reeve and the semi-paralysed gunshot victim, James Brady – were considered insufficient by Clinton and Morris. With all the media present in Chicago, they feared that the American public would still receive too much information about ...”

“... persisted in the Communist underground opposition to Stalin. Long before Solzhenitsyn, as Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2011, ‘the crucial questions about the Gulag were being asked by left oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to C.L.R. James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and prescient heretics have been somewhat ...”

“... The question then arose of whether all this was no more than ‘colonial myth-making’, as Christopher Bayly put it in the 1990s. With Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s celebrated 1983 formula of ‘the invention of tradition’ in mind, it became common to accuse the British of having ‘discovered’ nothing and ‘invented’ everything in their ...”

“... he writes to Katharine White, ‘that Mr West’s review of Augie March is disgraceful … Let us hope that it is only my mental health that is endangered and not that of your readers as well.’ Two weeks later, he is putting on his best shirt for Lionel Trilling. ‘The many criticisms of Augie I’ve seen since have made me appreciate yours all the more; I ...”

“... dominated these villages during the war and it now guaranteed a monolithic Zanu vote at the polls. Christopher Soames, the British pro-consul sent out to supervise the election, knew exactly what was going on but balked at the notion of taking military action to get the guerrillas back into their camps or, alternatively, declaring the vote null and void. In ...”

“... a long-dead lover, convincing herself that she is the reincarnation of the woman loved by the poet Christopher Lovelock in the 17th century. Her dull, uncomprehending husband becomes crazed with jealousy, and the story ends in bloodshed. The oddly detached narrator, an artist who has been employed to paint portraits of Alice and her husband, is fascinated by ...”

“... Revolution. Defoe boasted of wearing a mourning ring that had been given at the funeral of Christopher Love, a Presbyterian minister beheaded in 1653 for his part in a plot to overthrow Cromwell. Defoe mentions Love in his 1704 pamphlet The Dissenters Answer to the High-Church Challenge – it is reprinted in W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank’s excellent ...”

“... original sketch of the Greenwich Dome’ are twinned with ‘a sketch design for a dome by Sir Christopher Wren’. The puny scale of St Paul’s Cathedral is set against the enclosed acres of the tent on Bugsby’s Marshes. ‘This awesome structure dwarfs the famous domes of history.’ But, walking around nautical Greenwich, the first thing the visitor ...”

“... civilisation to all peoples. Freud’s bruising catalogue of the reality of the war in which such hope had been so naively invested is worth quoting at length: Then the war in which we had refused to believe broke out, and it brought – disillusionment . . . It disregards all the restrictions known as International Law, which in peacetime the states had ...”

“... Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his bagman. The granddaddy of them all, Blair’s own memoirs, are still to come. It is an unprecedented cascade of memoirs by prominent figures in a government which ...”

“... the sociologists Claus Offe and Wolfgang Streeck (Germany); the political scientists Christopher Bickerton (Britain), Morten Rasmussen (Denmark) and Antoine Vauchez (France); the historians Kiran Klaus Patel (Germany) and Vera Fritz (Luxembourg). In the work of these and other scholars, the dynamics of European integration emerge in a ...”

“... Battle of the Marne – ‘one of the decisive battles of the war’ – which ended the German hope for a quick victory and set the stage for four years of deadlock and misery. Tuchman says nothing about Austria-Hungary and Serbia on the eve of the war, and nothing about the Russo-Austrian and Serbo-Austrian fronts once it began. ‘The inexhaustible ...”

“... by Shelleyan acts of re-imagining what we do – such as his own. ‘This book’s ... ultimate hope, and expectation, is that the crisis in hermeneutics on the one hand and editorial method on the other will not fail to bring about their destined appointment.’ Though McGann uses literary examples, his methods and conclusions would probably seem familiar ...”

“... variously able and unable to cope; the one called Nadezhda packs and leaves – her name means ‘hope’. The peasant fusses about her cow Dasha. When the woman has been led back into her cubicle the senior medic remarks: ‘Don’t tell her, but Dasha and every other living thing in that zone has already been destroyed. It had to be done.’ The physicist ...”