“... The French, a people normally not plagued by a lack of national pride, revere very few of their past leaders. Consider the following list: Richelieu, Louis XIV, Robespierre, Napoleon, Clemenceau, De Gaulle. Which of them enjoys anything like the adoration from their countrymen that Americans give to the secular canon of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Kennedy? Napoleon himself is today remembered as a vainglorious tyrant who squandered his achievements ...”

“... In most parts of the United States, even those voters who could be numbered among Ronald Reagan’s most enthusiastic supporters removed the ‘Reagan-Bush ’84’ bumper-stickers from their cars fairly soon after the 1984 Election was safely in the bag. No one thought the things were supposed to adorn the family automobile in perpetuity in the way that Saint Christopher medals adorned the dashboards of Catholic drivers all over America in the simpler days before Vatican II ...”

“... met Richard Cobb at my Balliol interview one late evening in December 1970. The encounter was, by any measurement, a failure. In the ‘interests’ section of my entrance form, I had made the mistake of declaring membership of the Committee for Freedom in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea. Cobb, who was plainly bored at having to conduct interviews after ...”

“... and Some Explorers’. He distinguished between the provision of scientific facts, which could be of only limited interest, and the ‘drama of human endeavour’ embodied in the pursuit of a ‘militant geography’ larger and grander than the mere search for knowledge. Wade Davis’s book on the British Everest expeditions of 1921, 1922 and 1924 shows ...”

“... fades into the darkness. What kind of movie is Point Blank? And what kind of book is this, written by the man who made it?It would be hard to deliver a brief biographical sketch of John Boorman that was tidy or plausible. Yet it would be harder still to leave a reader in any doubt about ...”

“... things, a triumph of democracy. It has spread the belief in a rational society; human improvement by education, social improvement by the uses of science, decision-making by rational discourse are all a part of the prevailing creed.’ The welfare states of North-Western Europe and North ...”

“... inimitable style, the history workshop movement seems set fair to follow the path already blazed by that earlier enfant terrible, Past and Present, from mutinous opposition to respectable dissent. Nevertheless, as befitted their rebellious origins, these two publishing enterprises were boldly prefaced ...”

“... to the pieties before the serious business of governing begins, at which point the words tend to be forgotten. The only inaugural address with claims to have decisively shaped what followed came in 1841 when William Henry Harrison – ‘Old Tippecanoe’ – was so keen to show he was capable of observing the proprieties that he delivered a two-hour ...”

“... again at Heinrich, whose importance as a public and literary figure had been taken for granted by an earlier generation of writers. Gottfried Benn called him ‘one of my gods’; Lion Feuchtwanger thought him the greatest of the writers who had set out not only to depict the 20th century but to change it. Hamilton made a strong case that Heinrich Mann ...”

“... seem to fly to me and stick,’ he declares in the Preface to his collected works. This proves to be an irresistible locution for Gray (‘chewing gum flies to me on the subway and sticks’), and betrays an ambivalent egocentricity: that of a self towards which even rubbish gravitates. His is not the magnetism of a compelling personality, however. Gray ...”

“... It has stayed dead. The GDR was never, as some liked to believe, the continuation of Prussia by other means. Junker estates were broken up, and Prussia was distributed among the Poles and Russians as well as the Germans. Recent events are unlikely to change any of that. Restitution of property almost certainly does not apply to the former estates, and ...”

“... acquired disciples, especially in the Netherlands and Germany, who tended the flame after 1990 by issuing unfinished fragments and materials, such as Reflections on a Life. This contains a biographical interview first published in Dutch, and Elias’s ‘Notes on a Lifetime’, which originally appeared in German. Elias was born in 1897. The only child of ...”

“... make an image that isn’t imbued with gravity. Another is that everything in the picture seems to be in a place ordained for it. But not through a similar process. Poussin is a master manipulator of compositional tactics and strategies, shaping components and fitting them together in an ideal pictorial space with a peerless erudition, inventiveness and ...”

“... Once there was a town hall official in Cumberland who was so enthralled by the mountains that he walked and walked them, penetrating every byway, surveying every vista. To amuse himself he drew them and wrote about them, year after year. And the more his marriage languished, the more he walked, and drew, and wrote, until the seven volumes of A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells were complete ...”

“... to which Harold Wilson declined to commit British troops. The Borneo campaign was won largely by our domination of the immediate area of the border with Indonesia. There were a series of operations across the border to attack Indonesian military bases and communications. None of these received any publicity, not least because no journalists could visit ...”