“... of this subliminal vision can hardly be overstated. It creates the view of partition, as Conor CruiseO’Brien put it, not just as ‘a wrong’ but as ‘wrong’. This simple fact helps to explain how the persistent failure of nationalists to build bridges to the North has been paralleled by their uncanny ...”

“... and monstrosity on which colourful, emotive 19th-century writers such as Carlyle loved to draw. As Conor CruiseO’Brien observed, the spectre haunting Europe in the first sentence of The Communist Manifesto ‘walks for the first time in the pages of Burke’. Burke’s early opponents, English radicals such as Tom ...”

“... the evils of Communism. I believe that (brutality apart, which is not an issue between us) Tom O’Brien, Hugh Gaitskell, Georges Barnes, Lord Bridges, would behave as Communist bosses do if they got the chance. At any rate, it seems to me that for the English lover of liberty the main enemy is here, just as for the Russian it is in Russia. One should ...”

“... In other words, should the West want martial law to fail or to succeed? For that is the choice. Conor CruiseO’Brien puts it bluntly: ‘Should the West do all in its power to make Polish martial law fail, even if the most probable consequence of its failure is Russian military occupation of Poland?’ His ...”

“... readers can’t be expected to know that ‘prod’ means Protestant or that ‘the Cruiser’ is Conor CruiseO’Brien. Gourly is gurly or rough, a corrie is a mountain-hollow, a spooly is (I presume) a linen-worker. Some other words require guesswork or a fairly big dictionary: ‘fremd’ means ...”

“... leader Jaurès. Péguy’s characteristic idiom was perhaps more conservative than his principles. Conor CruiseO’Brien has suggested that Hill’s poem, despite explicitly condemning anti-semitism, seems to reinforce one aspect of anti-Dréyfusard propaganda by turning the Captain’s dignified behaviour into the ...”

“... of Ghana to offer him a chair at his new university, under its equally unexpected vice-chancellor, Conor CruiseO’Brien. There he remained with Hilde until retirement. Nothing was ever proved against Broda, who had been long (and, as was discovered in the 1990s, correctly) suspected by MI5, though its belief that he ...”

“... in political life at the centre poses a challenge to those seeking to understand his ideas. As Conor CruiseO’Brien complained in the most recent major biography, some of the Namierites who dominated 18th-century English historical scholarship from the Thirties to the Sixties were inclined to dwell on what they ...”

“... to feel quite comfortable with it. Take even so central an event as the execution of the King. As Conor CruiseO’Brien points out, for anyone committed to the notion of popular sovereignty the very existence of a king was an attack on all one held most dear, a crime against the nation – the King’s indictment ...”

“... Central African Federation and one by the UN, no firm evidence of skulduggery emerged. In 1992, Conor CruiseO’Brien and the Australian diplomat George Ivan Smith, both of whom were working for the UN in the Congo in the early 1960s, wrote to the Guardian arguing that Hammarskjöld had been the victim of a kidnap ...”

“... lucky the fellow happened to kill someone and provide the occasion for a trial. It’s true, as Conor CruiseO’Brien reminds us, that he does seem to have killed an Arab rather than a person, but it’s also true that he may care more about the Arab than does the settler society that prosecutes him. It’s true ...”

“... were, and are, forbidden to hold any direct communication with the ‘foreign’ British Army. Conor CruiseO’Brien warned that this Council would be a mistake. Power-sharing was a sufficiently difficult, if also promising experiment, and it would have been far wiser at this stage to have concentrated on that. The ...”

“... government of India. Is it an accident that the managers of the impeachment were both Irishmen? Conor CruiseO’Brien and Fintan O’Toole have argued that it was not; for ‘India’ read ‘Ireland’, and vice versa: both native populations – Hindu or Catholic – were subject to the imperial rapacities of the ...”

“... for Cultural Freedom, which funded Encounter, told Kermode that there was no truth at all in what Conor CruiseO’Brien was saying about the magazine: that it was an instrument of covert American operations, that ‘it was not quite an open forum,’ that ‘its political acoustics were a little odd.’ ‘I am old ...”

“... The deaths of the 1916 men were told and retold as perfect Christian parables.’ She quotes Conor CruiseO’Brien, who points out that the emphasis on the Catholic nature of the Rising made the partition of Ireland almost inevitable. But she is right to believe that the great turnaround in public opinion about ...”