“... cutting out the hedge funds and leaving the world a little saner, but that’s not what we seem to be seeing. The economy whines and wrinkles, like a washing-up liquid bottle (‘cleans, no added promises’) on a fire. Words rear up and loom enormous – David Cameron, for example, may find this with his plan for ‘thrifty ...”

“... well have won the war. Lieven argues that Tolstoy actually underestimated Russia’s achievement by dismissing the contribution of its generals and statesmen (especially those with German surnames). Making exhaustive use of Russian archives, Lieven explains how the Russian commanders equipped and moved hundreds of thousands of men, as well as their weapons ...”

“... Herne, an enthusiast for the gospel, told one of the city’s aldermen that he would rather be torn apart by wild horses than ever again say the Catholic Mass. In December 1553, Queen Mary newly enthroned, the alderman entered his parish church to find Herne at the altar, in his old vestments and all ready to ...”

“... as a versatile, witty literary journalist with a non-waffling mode of address that was thought to be distinctively, and refreshingly, Australian. He also turned out comic verse – Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage through the London Literary World and ‘The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered’ – and wrote lyrics for Pete Atkin, a singer-songwriter ...”

“... my battle with the bottle, had sent me an early copy of his book. The psychiatrist surprised me by saying: ‘Let me look into it, but I’m willing to try it.’ He was, he told me, a child psychiatrist, which immediately seemed both inevitable and desirable. I didn’t joke with him about it, however. No joking of any kind with the psychiatrist. He had ...”

“... to set out exploring unknown terrain with a map that could still even half-plausibly claim ‘here be dragons,’ you’d have to go deep underwater, deep underground or into deep space. The Nasa/METI map is a triumph of 21st-century technology and international co-operation. But amazing though it is, it’s in some ways less impressive than its distant ...”

“... which we are always told is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth; I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of the letter.’ Emotion is the fuel of one of the most compelling documents a historian can hold – the love letter. Mary Hewitt, the young wife of a Coventry lawyer, kissed his ...”

“... walk straight in. As the American woman behind me remarked, it’s the kind of queue that would be generated in the US by the opening weekend of Terminator 4. The show is well worth it. But once you’re in Paris, taking in the blockbuster effect and the tidal waves of press devoted to ‘the master’, with his ...”

“... Back​ in 1954, the American critic Ernest Campbell Mossner brought out a Life of David Hume that was not only a pioneering work of scholarship but also a labour of love. Mossner wanted to rescue his hero from the romantic reactionaries who typecast him as a narrow-minded representative of the Age of Reason. In particular, he hoped to challenge the condescension of Thomas Carlyle, who dismissed Hume as an associate of Voltaire and the French philosophes, and a slave to the ‘obscurations of sense, which eclipse this truth within us ...”

“... went dancing every week, if she didn’t have a shift – Maureen had been followed off the bus by a man who then stalked her all the way to her front door, lingering outside even as she slipped off her shoes in the hallway. It was with this in mind that she accepted Keith for the last dance of the evening, knowing he would ...”

“... committee. A law prevented corporations from giving money to politicians directly, but it could be circumvented by having employees give their own money to the senators and congressmen, governors and state legislators who might be able to help the company – when it came to setting ...”

“... abuses, let alone the Rabaa massacre or the mass imprisonment and torture of dissidents. When David Cameron held a meeting with Sisi in New York in September he spoke of ‘Egypt’s pivotal role in the region’ and its importance to British policy. ‘Both economically and in the fight against Islamist extremism’, he said, Egypt was a crucial ally and ...”

“... veering at times into wilfulness, continued undiminished until her death, 64 years later. By then she was Empress of India, and thanks to the carefully planned marriages of her nine children, the centre of a web of connections that extended across Europe into Russia. When she died her great-grandson Albert Frederick Arthur George was five and not in ...”

“... Either/Or (‘I feel as a chessman must feel when the opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved’), his first from Macbeth: ‘Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’ The quotation is so familiar that when there’s a riff on the word ‘blood’, even two hundred pages later, it ...”

“... balance between fiction and reality’. ‘We live,’ he writes, in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It ...”