“... princess manifest, a child withouten stain’ created a sentimental cult that swept through France, it shocked many of those who had known her in England: ‘why that foul-mouthed, virulent, brazen-faced broomstick of a creature should have got herself up as a pad of rose-scented cotton wool is beyond me,’ remarked ...”

“... alternative régime-in-waiting which they could join. Continental republics know this dualism. In France or Italy, Maclean would probably have been a prominent Communist with a bourgeois life-style, and quite possibly a good desk in the Foreign Ministry whose contents he would not have felt moved to microphotograph each night. In Britain, still an ancien ...”

“... finance were inextricably linked. But as a result of the spiralling costs of the wars against France, and because of Parliament’s desire to keep a tight grip on the Army, the control of military finance was taken over by the House of Commons, and from 1697, the new king, William III, was paid an annual sum by Parliament, to cover his own royal ...”

“... the happy beam-hunter of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and Zionism) and Roy Jenkins (the Government of 1951-55) are predictably good. The uneven John Keegan (... ’s Strategy), though seemingly disqualified by his recent published confession that he cannot understand Clausewitz, nevertheless succeeds ...”

“... cut it. The wearing of the headscarf, historically never something politicians had worried about, rose to become a national policy concern and was seen as not only un-British, but as a state security concern. In 2015 David Cameron called on institutions to devise their own ‘sensible rules’ about face veils, and Michael Wilshaw, the head of ...”

“... kissing Elizabeth on the lips. EBB keeps up a running commentary on political news from Italy and France, while the later letters are increasingly given over to excited reports of table-rapping and spiritualism. To judge by Elizabeth’s half of the dialogue, her sister does not seem to have shared her enthusiasm for Louis Napoleon or the ‘rapping ...”

“... policeman, was suffering from a spreading infection of his face that had started with a rose thorn scratch. He had lost an eye and the infection had spread to his lungs and his shoulder. On 12 February 1941 he was injected with penicillin made by Howard Florey and his team. Alexander’s condition improved dramatically. Treatment continued for five ...”

“... was chosen for the harem of the Xianfeng emperor of the Qing dynasty in 1852. In 1856 she rose steeply in rank after giving birth to the first (and as it happened only) male heir to the throne. When the emperor died in 1861, Cixi’s five-year-old son became the Tongzhi emperor. A regency of six male officials along with the late emperor’s ...”

“... off in deep winter; when she finally dismounted, it was spring. ‘The birds were singing. Dust rose behind the seed drills as they worked over the dry fields. Everything was preparing for a new beginning. Could life really go on, as if nothing had happened?’ This book is, in large part, about people who at different times pretended that nothing had ...”

“... both tedious and dangerous. Sir Thomas Wyatt was born in 1503, high and close to the throne, and rose higher and closer. He was the eldest son of Sir Henry Wyatt, who had been a courtier and soldier, a privy counsellor and a bureaucrat of the old school. Henry had remained loyal to Henry Tudor throughout Richard III’s reign, despite starvation and ...”

“... books of memory’ by a union that serves only to deface the ‘monuments of conquered France,/Undoing all as all had never been’. Talbot is presented not so much as an individual but as a ‘collective self’, the embodiment of ‘something like an imagined community’; in his absence, we are left with the ineffectual Henry who, flanked by a ...”

“... Normans and the absolutism of the Stuarts, in the Victorian era the Saxon witenagemot mystically rose again in the form of city council chambers. Civic self-government became a symbol of British identity. ‘On the other side of the Channel, Paris is France, but no such rule applies with us,’ the Birmingham Daily Press ...”

“... radicals, like Bolívar, who was Constant’s contemporary and admired what had been happening in France, take this to mean the liberty of an inclusive nation, and give it a socialist cast. But until the late 20th century, the criollos’ refined sense of racial difference (made all the more acute by much cross-breeding) led them to keep active ...”

“... at the trial of John Scopes, the Tennessee teacher charged with teaching evolution in 1925). France, meanwhile, was torn apart by the Dreyfus Affair. Division on this scale is potentially fatal to democracy; trust, as Runciman reminds us, is its lifeblood. However, both democracies survived, with Dreyfus exonerated in 1906, and the Democrats able to ...”

“... forth, discussing events of the late 1920s as if they are contemporary – the question of whether France will accept the exiled Trotsky, the demonstration of a shortwave radio in Berlin – until Gospodinov tires of the game and breaks off the correspondence. Several years pass before Gaustine writes again, in a letter dated August 1939, making despairing ...”