“... 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 ...”

“... her grandmother’s childhood, are the foundations of Gray’s biography. Landemare’s father, Mark Young, was coachman to the Liberal MP Cyril Flower. Her mother, Mary, had been in service until her marriage, and the family belonged to what Gray calls ‘the affluent working class’. Between Aldbury, the picturesque but poor village where Landemare was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her decks. Within minutes the liner listed to starboard and her bow started to sink. As the stern rose in the water, four great propellers could be clearly discerned. Then she was gone. George Henderson was only six at the time. ‘I can still sit here now,’ he told a TV crew in 1994, ‘and see that great liner just sliding below the waves.’ The ...”

“... back in the past, but not so far back that humans weren’t present to be affected, sea levels rose to drown what’s known as Doggerland, create the North Sea and cut off Britain and Ireland from the European continent and each other. It’s not surprising, then, that we can see evidence of massive changes of behaviour: long barrows giving way to stone ...”

“... after a violent whirlwind ensued, which blew down nearly every house in the village … The sea rose nearly twelve feet higher than it had ever been known to do before … sweeping away houses and every thing within its reach … there were certainly not fewer than twelve thousand individuals in Tomboro and Pekáté at the time of the eruption, of whom only ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... young man … There runs through all he says and does that vein of irony by which we may so often mark one of life’s self-acknowledged failures … a man of parts without character and with more wit than sense.’ The actor offers no comment, but by now he doesn’t need to. David Gates, the creator of these connoisseurs of disappointment and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gravel of Martyrs’ Square in central Beirut, where early in the 20th century Lebanese patriots rose up against the Ottoman Empire and were slaughtered. The statue in the square commemorating their deaths is pockmarked with bullet holes from the civil war. There is a carnival atmosphere of the kind that often accompanies collective political ...”

“... ten places on the UN Human Development Index between 1990 and 2000, even though per capita income rose from $368 to $2000. Shaxson provides some vivid glimpses into the misery of these seemingly rich nations, but his real concern is to explain how and why they have failed so badly. He is sceptical of the left-wing tendency to see the problem in terms of ...”