“... years’ tale again, Hitler as a personality no longer seems so outlandish. What does mark him out is his conscious abandonment of conventional morality: the monstrous, shameless ease with which he lied, betrayed and murdered. The traits of his character, on the other hand, are not remarkable in themselves. Thousands of people around us daydream ...”

“... wandering the piers of the Vieux Port. An elderly Vietnamese woman picked him up off the rue de la Rose; he found work in a Chinese restaurant; he took refuge in a boys’ bordello, where he tried opium for the first time and lived for a year – or two, or four – using the papers of a young drowned man. Finally, two gendarmes took him back to Paris. Arnaud ...”

“... stone or rubbing sticks together. However it happened, the human control of fire made an indelible mark on the earth’s ecosystems, and marked the beginning of the Anthropocene – the epoch in which humans have had a significant impact on the planet. In Against the Grain James Scott describes these early stages as a ‘“thin” Anthropocene’, but ever ...”

“... bitterness and boatloads of swagger. A special operative can find himself being played by Mark Wahlberg in a big budget movie, as Marcus Luttrell did in the 2013 adaptation of his memoir, Lone Survivor, so secret military actions aren’t something you want to keep quiet about. As one serving SEAL told the Washington Post in 2011, neatly ...”

“... vessel. The circumnavigation of the globe he later undertook to complete his training left no mark on him, except the tattoos he acquired in Japan and Jerusalem. More significant was the lifelong punctilio about dress and deportment he learned from his superiors, which shaped his peculiar combination of rigidity and passivity.Shooting filled the gap left ...”

“... The partisan sniping and polarisation of the Giuliani era was put on pause after 9/11 as he rose to fill the unaccustomed roles of pacifier and unifier. In the immediate shock and chaos of the destruction of the Twin Towers, he became the take-charge guy, forging dynamically through the dust and rubble of Ground Zero. His shabby decision-making had ...”

“... clutch of recent biographies has toppled several notable royal icons from their pedestals. Kenneth Rose depicted George V as an ogre so boorish and philistine that in retrospect he appears almost pathetically comical. In his books on Edward VIII, Michael Bloch has washed a great deal of the Abdication dirty linen in public, and much of the mud has stuck to the ...”

“... enlisted to rescue Britain from decline and the Labour Party from dissension. Benn offered a Mark II version of Wilsonian politics – a thoroughly up-to-date, restyled, lightweight modification of the original model, but one which embodied many of the same features, even down to the reassuring pipe-smoking image. No more than Wilson could Benn see the ...”

“... those artists he trusted’. Ominous. At every turning-point in Nijinsky’s career a question-mark hangs over the matter of who was responsible for what happened: when he stalked out of the Imperial Ballet after being reprimanded for dancing Albrecht without trunks over his tights, had he really offended the sensibilities of an Archduchess, or had this ...”

“... venture, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, in 1851, was the high-water mark of Albert’s career, a popular success and a personal one for which the prince did for once get the public appreciation he deserved. It was he who provided the impetus, addressing meetings of mayors and industrialists to whip up enthusiasm while Henry Cole ...”

“... Bokhalil, who is in his early forties, joined the Muslim Brotherhood when he was 21, and rose to become one of its leaders in Alexandria. He quit a month after Mubarak’s overthrow, frustrated by its authoritarianism, and its failure to embrace the uprising fully. Aboul-Fotouh, he said, was Egypt’s only true consensus candidate, a man supported by ...”

“... one another, terrified that the wrong cleric had censed the pope.Amid the ruins, a new city slowly rose. Ambitious popes such as Nicholas V in the 1440s and 1450s, known for his wild spending on buildings, books and vestments, and Julius II half a century later, found ways to mark the city as their own. Nicholas fortified ...”

“... twinges’, ‘scalding heat’ and the excrescence of ‘deep-tinged loathsome matter’. ‘I rose very disconsolate, having rested very ill by the poisonous infection raging in my veins and anxiety and vexation boiling in my breast. What! thought I, can this beautiful, this sensible, and this agreeable woman be so sadly defiled?’ Louisa refused to ...”

“... during that time, the number of families who live in poverty but have one or more adults in work rose from 2 million to 7.4 million. The Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that the increasingly precarious nature of life above the poverty line means these figures probably downplay the true extent of poverty, since people may dip below the threshold ...”

“... character in modern history’. In light of such dedication, charges of autocracy rather miss the mark, for the Pankhursts, like all charismatic leaders, elicited a devotional response: new and extreme acts of militancy – self-harming, going on hunger strike, blowing up pillarboxes – were as likely to be initiated from below as dictated from the ...”