“... do precisely this has taken him through almost every imaginable archive of relevance, in Britain, France and the Low Countries. He has shone light on how groups of legal and financially minded servants helped drive this period of ‘intensifying governance’ in England and northern Europe. Henry VII’s New Men and the Making of Tudor England is, in many ...”

“... however inadequate, as the last great military commander of the British Empire. ‘Wavell’s star rose high at an early stage of the war,’ his friend Basil Liddell Hart wrote. ‘The glow was the more brilliant because of the darkness of the sky.’ He entered the army in 1900, aged 17 and straight from school. Commissioned a year later, he was sent to ...”

“... having a son and putting out feelers for a career in politics and the City. He returned to France for a few months in 1918 in a job far from danger, but even then got sick and was, according to Simon Ball, ‘forced’ back to London. Unsurprisingly, what counted for the men of this generation was how a person had behaved in the war. Macmillan, taxed ...”

“... all from which we lived, becomes invisible.’ By 1907, Malevich had become involved with the Blue Rose group of artists, whose roots lay in Symbolism. He exhibited his work at the Moscow Society of Artists, along with Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova and Kandinsky. The following year, he attended the Golden Fleece Salon, an exhibition of two hundred ...”

“... they had at the same time to write like men, and even – following the example of George Sand in France – to adopt male names, like ‘Currer Bell’ and ‘George Eliot’. No wonder their achievement had been meagre: a handful of classics and ‘innumerable bad novels which have ceased to be recorded even in textbooks … novels that lie scattered like ...”

“... hiding out in a cottage in West Cork. The paintings were found unharmed in the boot of her car.Rose Dugdale wasn’t what anybody was expecting. For one thing, she was an English heiress, the daughter of a member of Lloyd’s of London who owned an estate in Devon. Born in 1941, she had lived a life of privilege: educated at Miss Ironside’s School for ...”

“... praise the clerk who attended on them, Robert Aslett, for his unfailing diligence. Aslett later rose to become Second Cashier and was in line for the top job, but he lost thousands on private speculations and stole thousands more in Exchequer bills to cover his losses. He was condemned to death, the sentence commuted to life imprisonment, a mercy not ...”

“... Such agreement does not exclude arrière-pensées in this or that government – Germany, France and Austria have all at different points entertained them – but against any passage of these to action lies the formidable barrier of a unanimity of media opinion more complete, and more committed to Turkish entry, than that of the Council or Commission ...”

“... to exchange dreams and memories, above all to argue with him, then we get such superb stories as A Rose for Emily, or Go down Moses, or that splendid saga The Bear (but firmly cutting out the addenda), or that weird, haunting half-fantasy about aboriginal Indians which I do not even pretend to understand called Red Leaves, or we get his three time-outlasting ...”

“... out all over Poland; at one point Stanisław August himself was kidnapped. A Barist appeal to France tempted Rousseau to sketch a free Polish constitution, which Butterwick calls ‘wondrously beautiful in its romantic impracticality’. Rousseau persuaded himself that disorder was precisely what kept Polish liberty alive. If the peoples of the ...”

“... conspiring for ‘national liberation’. The Pentarchy – Russia, Austria, Prussia, Britain and France – wanted all such movements crushed. The Greeks in particular threatened the painstakingly constructed post-Napoleonic order. There were three million of them, Christians who lived across an area stretching from the Greek mainland to Cyprus to the coasts ...”

“... got bards who were straightforwardly poets, and usually poets who aimed to be ‘bardic’. France and Germany, it’s true, have national poets who are dramatists, but no one is likely to call either Racine or Goethe a bard. So why Shakespeare? One reason may be that England had few contenders. Anglo-Saxon poetry was virtually forgotten. Even Chaucer ...”

“... Super Typhoon Haiyan and whose home region was arguably destroyed by the police state that rose in the typhoon’s wake. The brothers marched a thousand miles on foot across the Alps to arrive in Paris for the start of the 2015 UN Climate Summit, with Miller joining them for the last few kilometres. But the climate talks took place just weeks after ...”

“... having easy access to a huge pool of private capital allowed it to outspend and ultimately defeat France, even though it was larger and more populous. The failure of the French monarchy to find an equivalent method of managing its debt hastened its overthrow in 1789. The bank didn’t lend only to the state. It was a principal source of credit for London ...”

“... you can do about it.’ What unites Powell, Pavey and Witts? If a visitor from 18th-century France were to spend time in Tewkesbury, and if he were asked to describe a new Three Estates for the town and English towns like it, he might reasonably conclude that Tewkesbury was divided between public servants, private servants and localists. Powell, Pavey ...”