“... years. After King’s Cross the London Transport chiefs not only stuck close to their office, but took the opportunity to make it clear that the cuts in staff would continue. In Thatcher’s Britain, you need a disaster or two to prove you do not flinch from the gruelling demands of free enterprise. ‘Disaster Woman’ – yes, especially in 1987, when in ...”

“... successive British Governments were well aware of this, as were the Unionists. In 1993, however, John Hume’s talks with Gerry Adams reached the point where an unconditional cessation of IRA violence became a real possibility and the Major Government was persuaded by Dublin to open the way for such a development by committing itself publicly to the Irish ...”

“... and surveillance. Refined in the crucible of war, the centralised, bureaucratic state first took a recognisably modern shape in 17th and 18th-century Europe and showed the rest of the world ‘the image of its own future’. As Charles Tilly has put it, ‘war made the state, and the state made war.’ But how (and when and where) did war make the ...”

“... the year but Gaitskell had divided his party for ten. That was almost certainly not necessary. It took Wilson and Marcia Falkender to put it, for a time, together again. At Health, Macleod was a success, too much so for Vaizey’s taste, because he let dental assistants scale teeth, built more hospitals, and secured acceptance for the Guillebaud Report. In ...”

“... There are Lennonesque conceptual twisters: (There was a maid her   name was Jim they always took her   name for him). There is an epic which refuses the consolations of mythologising (‘News of Warring Clans’); a prose work which traces the route by which value thins out into exchange value (‘A Note on Metal’); and the deliciously funny and ...”

“... and marry bitches.’ White’s war in the North African desert was dreary on the whole, but it took him to Alexandria where, in July 1941, he met Manoly Lascaris, ‘this small Greek of immense moral strength, who became the central mandala of my life’s hitherto messy design’. Forty years later they are still together. When the war ended White wanted ...”

“... of the press organs in that difficult period, was supported from time to time by the Government. John Walter II, no longer having that support, switched into opposition in 1820 and supported Queen Caroline against George IV. Whether or not his motives were disinterested, his sales more than doubled. There is nothing like sexual scandal and public passion to ...”

“... taxes on America, in the shape of the Townshend Acts of 1767 (to which other Americans like John Dickinson and Samuel Adams responded with ever more ingenious arguments like the right of Parliament to legislate for the colonies, as against tax them), Franklin wrote his son William ‘that no middle doctrine can be well maintained ... Something might be ...”

“... the Whigs have often been dismissed as a party of frivolous aristocrats playing at politics, who took up various reforming causes only to drop them when they seriously threatened Whig interests. This is a rather harsh view, and one would expect Holland House to play a part in its refutation. For in a period when the landed aristocracy possessed vast ...”

“... in an interview, ‘is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest.’ He took from Nietzsche what he needed – the critical element, everything that is exemplified in the phrase ‘genealogy of morals’ – leaving the metaphysics of the will to power, the Übermensch and much else. What was important to him in Nietzsche was not so ...”

“... other’s eyes, just as you have seen the untamed things of the wild. Poor Little Woman! ... I took her by the shoulders and placed myself in front of her. With my right I forced the father back, while the left arm held off the son. ‘Enough of that,’ I said. ‘Listen to me. I’ll knock down the one who strikes first, without the slightest ...”

“... was the son of an architect who had learned his profession under the comfortably traditionalist John Nash, but his own vision, actuated by the ‘throb of possibility’ (lovely, phrase), was engaged with the architecture of the future as embodied in Fontaine’s designs. He was a practical idealist, and the heart of the novel is the fate of his dream. The ...”

“... His first paragraph is a model: No conquest is free of catastrophe. Duke William came and took what he wanted. And of course there were those who got hurt. But obvious though that is, revisionist historians today dwell less on the changes imposed by the Normans than on what they were content to leave alone. That is not the way it looks in the building ...”

“... There was firepower enough to mash up a vast landscape and wreck the water table, but it still took hundreds of rounds to kill one man. Most of the book deals with the shifting battle tactics of Gough and General Sir Herbert Plumer, who commanded the Second Army, as seen from command level (a good overall map of the entire Western Front would have been a ...”

“... of climatic change. This tradition has been continued recently among Anglophone historians by John Pryor’s analysis of how the patterns of weather, winds, currents and coastal topography in the Mediterranean shaped its economic and military history, by Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World and by the work of Donald Worster and Alfred Crosby. If ...”