“... sentenced to death. He escaped, possibly killing his guard, fled to Belgrade, Beirut and finally France, where he joined the Foreign Legion, was wounded and captured before escaping again and moving on to Britain to avoid the advancing Nazi forces.His decision to join the British army led to two noteworthy incidents. First, with reckless courage, he stormed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... broken up at the end of the First World War, its constituent parts redistributed among Britain, France, Belgium, Australia and South Africa. Small in surface area compared to the British, ephemeral in duration, the former empire still attracted attention in the interwar years, when colonial propagandists lobbied to get it back, but even the Nazis paid it ...”

“... meanwhile been driven between them by the Dreyfus Affair, which did the same to friends throughout France. While J’Accuse, Zola’s indictment of the military conspirators who framed Dreyfus, became the rallying cry of the Dreyfusard movement, ‘Cézanne,’ Danchev writes, ‘had nothing to say about the affaire, which he observed as from a distance.’ He ...”

“... disparagingly put it. Born in New Zealand, she spent all her time in London and Germany and France just getting by, struggling with lack of money and poor health, writing in beds and bedsits, out of suitcases and in overnight hotels and all the time imagining a kind of writing that didn’t yet exist. And where everyone else in the new modernist age had ...”

“... explain why there have been so many surprises and unexpected reversals of fortune. The Taliban rose again in 2006 because it hadn’t been beaten as comprehensively as the rest of the world imagined. At the end of 2001 I was able to drive – nervously but safely – from Kabul to Kandahar, but when I tried to make the same journey in 2011 I could go no ...”

“... developed to attack them, varied; and those programmes weren’t necessarily ‘progressive’. France was slow to develop comprehensive unemployment insurance but was a pioneer in addressing the costs of children’s dependence; Nazi Germany showered benefits on families, but only when they promoted the regime’s racial imperatives. Welfare policies meet ...”

“... gravel of Martyrs’ Square in central Beirut, where early in the 20th century Lebanese patriots rose up against the Ottoman Empire and were slaughtered. The statue in the square commemorating their deaths is pockmarked with bullet holes from the civil war. There is a carnival atmosphere of the kind that often accompanies collective political ...”

“... United States,’ his travelling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, added, ‘as glory is the god of France . . . If one is born to think, he thinks; if he is born to make money, he does not think.’ Vidal puts the same point just as sharply, reflecting that the United States never developed ‘a true civilisation’: ‘cellophane and Kleenex were never quite ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... principles of the great working-class movement, not only in Germany and Switzerland, but in France, in Holland and Belgium, in America, and even in Italy and Spain’. Growing in stature and influence as its message spread across the Continent, Capital had become ‘the Bible of the working class’ (a phrase Engels used without irony). In a letter of ...”

“... his father’s pacifism and spent the later part of the First World War as an orderly in northern France. After the war he studied architecture in London and then took a job as a clerk of works at the Plaza Paramount in Piccadilly, which had ornate Renaissance-style plasterwork and a Wurlitzer organ. The Plaza opened in 1926, the year before The Jazz ...”