“... those days. Rich families vied for the papacy; loyalties inclined to this or that superpower, to France or to Spain; momentarily, the people of Naples rose against Spain and were suppressed; every two or three decades, a plague would descend. The economy was an ox-cart stuck on a muddy road, with most cities’ populations ...”

“... the Sunni majority. Four years after Syria gained independence, Hafez joined the air force and rose quickly up the ranks. After the Ba’athist military coup of 1963 he became increasingly powerful, as head of the air force and then minister of defence. In 1970, he staged a bloodless coup from within the ruling military committee, which he called the ...”

“... This is a situation without parallel in any other European state. In different ways, unions in France, Germany and Italy carry a good deal more clout than they do in the UK – even though in France, for example, a much smaller percentage of workers belong to them. Yet the way people work is changing more radically than ...”

“... coteries of addicts. Plenty of others were on the trail in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in France. They included Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as a Duke University elite in the US. In a survey of the trend in the journal Anthropoetics in 1997, Douglas Collins wrote that back in 1984 Julia Kristeva had noted that ‘we’re ...”

“... based on fleeting shared interests, and fighting against enemies from their own faiths.Rodrigo rose to prominence as an uncommonly skilled warrior in the court of Sancho II of Castile, where he was head of the king’s personal retinue. After Sancho’s sudden death, he entered the service of the late king’s brother Alfonso VI, ruler of the now enlarged ...”

“... old pro. As a Labour backbencher, he apprenticed himself to the system; as a Labour minister, he rose through the system; in both roles he was shaped, in a thousand ways, by the system. But he earned his place in British history as leader of the SDP, when he came closer to smashing the system than anyone since Lloyd George in the Twenties. Having steamed ...”

“... the milkman’s chop. His striving up the stair, the bottle’s chink, I rose from bed, lit a cigarette. And walked to the window ... It is perhaps the earnestness of this that is its most appealing feature, its implicit faith in poetry. It teems with echoes of Eliot, Yeats, Auden, Baudelaire, but, as in much of Eliot’s own earlier ...”

“... the Spanish Court in the 17th century any more than Ingres’s can from conditions in 19th-century France. The age makes a contribution, and portrait painters may do so too – I imagine that the way a late 19th-century heiress sat on a sofa was not uninfluenced by Boldini or Sargent – but even the great flatterers had to have something to build ...”

“... for the single men. In the 1860s the prevalent view was that they ordered these matters better in France. In 1864 Parliament passed the first of the Contagious Diseases Acts, providing for state regulation of prostitution in certain seaport and garrison towns in Britain. India followed suit with a similar Act in 1868, and for the protection of British troops ...”

“... at that time. But Stalin had no desire to diminish his friends’ enthusiasm for the invasion of France. After Kursk the German front was steadily rolled back in a series of offensives unleashed at different times on different sections of the front. Stalin had grasped by now that it was unwise to attempt to counter-attack everywhere at once. Until the early ...”

“... Marlowe novels, the first a series written by an often-expatriate American living in England and France and dreaming of the frontier, the second by a self-described ‘man without a country’, an American brought up in England and Ireland who, writing in Los Angeles, longed for the country from which he had exiled himself. We are undergoing a Chandler ...”

“... Pless wrote that she ‘had relatives and dear friends in England, Germany, Austria, Hungary, France, Spain, Russia, Sweden … How well these best elements of the fighting nations knew each other and despite this they had to continue killing each other.’ She was obliged to declare her allegiance to Germany, her husband’s country. Aristocratic men ...”

“... to London. The next day, confident conditions were improving, he set off again. The snow in France was thick and he didn’t reach Geneva until Christmas Eve. He then took a diligence to Sallanches, at the bottom of the track up to Chamonix, arriving at sunset to find, to his great surprise, that there was no sledge available for the formidable ...”

“... and stopped corresponding with German relatives. Ridley amplifies a discovery made by Kenneth Rose, whose biography was published in 1983, that the responsibility for rescinding the offer of asylum to the deposed Romanovs lay directly with George. Once captured by the Bolsheviks, the Romanovs couldn’t have escaped Russia anyway, but George’s reasons ...”

“... Bourbon, Naples-based king, who was obliged to withdraw his forces from Sicily. In February, Paris rose against its government. In March, the Viennese did likewise and the arch conservative Metternich was dismissed. Monarchs in Naples, Turin, Florence and Vienna all promised their people constitutions. On 17 March, a demonstration in Venice forced Manin’s ...”