“... to be from most of our rulers today. In 1950 when it was decided to go ahead with the H-bomb, David Lilienthal remarked: ‘Where this will lead us is difficult to see. We keep on saying, “We have no other course.” What we should be saying is, “We are not bright enough to see any other course.’ ” The interesting question is whether contemporary ...”

“... scalding, staplebound enemy of mixed metaphors, pan-Germanism, the House of Habsburg, everything French, pro-semites and anti-semites, and the popular press, especially Vienna’s paper of record, the Neue Freie Presse. In 1899, the 24-year-old Kraus – the son of a wealthy paper manufacturer from Gitschin in Bohemia, now Jičín in the Czech Republic ...”

“... certainly she would have thought so, and that is clearly the point in the mock-Tudor subtitle of David Loades’s biography. Mary’s failure dealt a permanent blow to England’s long-standing alignment with the Habsburgs and their Burgundian predecessors. Both Mary and Elizabeth had a capacity for inspiring loyalty from close friends, who formed their ...”

“... but most of the time as the icon of the Little Flower which was to serve as a talisman for so many French soldiers in Flanders. The anthropologist William Christian discovered the discarded negatives of a man who had worked at the Basque shrine of Ezquioga in the Thirties. Comparing them to the photographs which were chosen as official souvenirs, he found that ...”

“... sounded good to her. She was envious of her clever only daughter and favoured her youngest child, David. One of Ethel’s childhood friends remembered that Tessie was ‘more bigoted than religious … If God had meant for Ethel to have music lessons, he would have provided them. As he hadn’t there was something sinful about music lessons.’ Much of the ...”

“... focus of his thoughts. Armstrong has long since smoothed away any imperfections. Even the pidgin French he uses in interviews sounds like a lightweight, customised idiom, reduced to essential components, designed to repel the sludge of ambiguities and misperceptions. We walk beside the riders as they skim through the thinning crowd to their air-conditioned ...”

“... return to their true nature of unselfish sharing. It’s a transfiguration first seen in the French Revolution; most recently (in flashes) during the 1968 ‘events’ of Berlin and the Paris May. We, or our children, will see it again. In Barcelona and Catalonia, this epiphany was released (they wouldn’t have liked the word ‘led’) by anarchists ...”

“... pillars of conventional Marxist history, from François Furet’s revisionist studies of the French Revolution to Stedman Jones’s own work re-examining the relationship between labour and capital in industrialising Britain. Meanwhile, an obsessive attention to discourse and language was sweeping through the humanities, a trend Stedman Jones’s long ...”

“... diary might not be quite a classic, but it becomes one in the hands of its exemplary editor David Vaisey, who has trimmed it to not much more than a third of its original length, and richly supplemented its information about the village’s inhabitants and about Turner’s family and business. In this way he quietly helps to substantiate the observation ...”

“... of Habsburg domination of the continent, was France. Conflict between the Habsburgs and the Valois French flared intermittently. There were two main flashpoints: the perpetually war-torn Italian peninsula, and North-West Europe. Over the years, the struggle between England, France and the Habsburg Low Countries had led to a series of shifting alliances, and ...”

“... is a 1912 story of robbery, murder and retribution involving a Jewish trader, a Berber sheik and a French colonial officer. Despite the story’s complexities, Kuper shows, it hides no ‘impenetrable cultural mysteries . . . the parties grasped the nature of the business pretty adequately at the time.’ In short, a great deal of behaviour that is loosely ...”

“... times have changed, incidentally: Hattersley bobs up all over the place in these pages, and David Steel gets a couple of footnotes, but Margaret Thatcher, Neil Kinnock, David Owen and Arthur Scargill make no appearance.) Mrs Castle was generally rated a highly effective departmental minister, and from these diaries ...”

“... report did not endear him to the War Cabinet. He compared the British troops unfavourably with the French, and used words like ‘callow’ and ‘effeminate’ to describe their poor performance. A minor incident which may have had far-reaching consequences was Auchinleck’s sacking of the CO of the 1st Scots Guards, Lt-Col Trappes-Lomax, for abandoning a ...”

“... that Cambodia will follow a system of liberal democracy on the basis of pluralism.’ To read David Chandler’s painstakingly researched history of Cambodia and its turbulent politics since 1945, and to visit present-day Cambodia, is to understand the enormity of the task facing the United Nations as it attempts to bring peace to the country and to ...”

“... in 1907, followed by Hungary, Britain and Bavaria (now the German pavilion) in 1909, and the French and Swedish pavilions in 1912 (the latter was given to the Netherlands when the Swedes failed to pay). After the First World War came Spain, Czechoslovakia, the US, Greece and Austria and the site was expanded across the canal to incorporate the gardens of ...”