“... is very far from won. Why haven’t the complete papers on the 1914 Curragh mutiny – when a group of British officers threatened to resign rather than impose Home Rule on Ulster by force – been made public? Or the papers on the Suez crisis, or on Rudolf Hess’s 1941 flight to Britain? Or on the royal family’s ...”

“... formed when the second Labour administration collapsed in the wake of the 1931 financial crisis was ‘national’ in name only. It was an example of the sinuous adaptability and capacity for reacting to circumstance that have made the Tories so effective at attaining and retaining power. There has been something called a Tory Party in England since ...”

“... in 1996 and hailed as Time’s ‘most talked about’ book of the year. It has become an international bestseller and its author has become a ubiquitous presence on the Holocaust ‘circuit’.In A Nation on Trial, a book written with Ruth Bettina Birn, I sought to expose the shoddiness of Goldhagen’s book. Birn, an authority on the archives ...”

“... US law and ensure that its funds were not being used for terrorism, or for any specific party or group, but for purely humanitarian purposes. No one at the trial disputed the extent of the human crisis that the HLF sought to alleviate. On the contrary, the former US consul general in Jerusalem (the de facto ambassador to ...”

“... the splendours of the court and the implications of its culture, the complexities of the international situation. Thanks to Steven Gunn, Sean Cunningham, Paul Cavill and one or two others, we are beginning to develop a convincing political narrative that joins the story of the pretenders with the innovations in government, their domestic reception ...”

“... known) also brought together a variety of scholars to discuss the history of the Italian and international working classes. Major figures on the Italian Left, such as Angelo Tasca, a companion of Gramsci in Turin in the early 1920s, and Pietro Secchia, the hard man of the PCI in the 1940s and 1950s, left their papers and even their libraries to the ...”

“... Hailed as a ‘little Englander’ before the First World War, by 1920 he had become an ‘international man’. In the 1950s, A.J.P. Taylor retrospectively enlisted him as a member of CND, but a decade later he was being pulled in the opposite direction by the free marketeers of the Mont Pélérin Society in Europe and the Foundation for Economic ...”

“... planners (Rexford Tugwell) and social-welfare liberals (Harry Hopkins). This was the heterogeneous group that lay behind the American version of the welfare state. A flurry of legislation followed; dams and highways were built; electricity was brought to remote rural areas; there was regulation of finance capital; people were put to work maintaining parks and ...”

“... at 58 in London?’ Adonis Papaconstantinou, a businessman in Nicosia who is organising a campaign group of depositors who lost money in the bank crash, told me about a man who’d retired three months earlier, stashed his €350,000 pension fund in Laiki and lost a quarter of a million euros. ‘You’re talking about somebody who doesn’t know about ...”

“... at the Palace. Even the Cabinet war-council is cruising for some green relief, some planetary crisis to get them off the hook. Publishers have only to bring into focus all this universal, non-specific weather angst, then to feed it, fan it, explain it away. The resultant, glossy anthologies of climatic irregularities – acid rain, the Milankovitch ...”

“... How else can I take it if I don’t take it personally?’ ‘This is not an important crisis,’ he said. ‘It won’t alter the history of the world. We both knew it was coming. You would never keep me away from my people just as I would never keep you away from your books. We’ve had some good times together, maybe learned a little from each ...”

“... he plots are familiar – from patriarchy to performance in women’s studies, from interest-group pluralism to individualist rational choice theory in political science – the cumulative effect of reading the same story again and again across so many fields is arresting. When Ronald Reagan begins to sound like Judith Butler and right-wing evangelicals ...”

“... end up being, his 1500 pages turn with speed. Set pieces such as the 1963 Conservative leadership crisis, the 1966 World Cup final and the 1970 general election are extremely well done and exciting to read, even for those who remember who won. His treatment of major political figures is untypically nuanced: both Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson escape the ...”

“... guerrillas engaged in wars of anticolonial liberation.Under Kennedy a cabinet-level Special Group was set up to counter ‘subversive insurgency’. The deputy secretaries of defence and state, the heads of the CIA and the US Information Agency (USIA), the chair of the joint chiefs, the attorney general and Rostow were all ...”

“... argument also snaps the point off the damaging question of Diego Garcia, raised, in this group of books, by the Latin American Bureau and by Anthony Barnett. If the kelpers were too few and boring to be rescued, what was wrong with throwing the population of Diego Garcia out of their homes to make way for an American air base? The Diego Garcians too ...”