“... Mao was effectively a despot. But the now familiar comparisons of him to Stalin or Hitler miss the mark. His style of rule combined three forms of lawless power, each sharing some features with tyrannies elsewhere, but whose combination produced an autocracy fundamentally sui generis. The first lay in millennial traditions of imperial sovereignty in ...”

“... concern her staff, her family were actually rather relieved. She had always kept them up to the mark and age had not made her more indulgent. Reading, though, had. She left the family more to themselves, chivvied them hardly at all and they had an easier time all round. Hurray for books was their feeling, except when they were required to read them or when ...”

“... results for Turkish capital. Exports trebled in value. New enterprises sprang up, profits rose and wages declined. Amid accelerating growth, and a general climate of enrichissez-vous, a contemporary consumerism arrived for the middle class. At the same time, Özal more openly exploited religion to consolidate his position than any of his ...”

“... from a few appreciative programmers, cinephiles and critics. Cahiers du cinéma was slow off the mark, fluffing its first interview with Akerman (a faulty tape recorder) and dismissing the second as ‘a bit too personal’. But the magazine soon made up for its neglect, publishing an essayistic review of Jeanne Dielman that read the film through a ...”

“... by Rome dealt a huge blow to this pretension. Political resistance proved futile; three times Jews rose in revolt against Roman rule, and each time were crushed. But there was a religious route out of the crisis in the teaching of Jesus, an ecstatic who believed in his own divinity, which Paul could transform into a faith beyond Judaism, no longer defined by ...”

“... surplus higher even than the figure the IMF had demanded. For citizens, prices and unemployment rose as growth fell by 50 per cent. But what was bitter medicine for militants was nectar to bond-holders: the spectre of default was banished. Growth resumed in 2004 as exports recovered. Even so the public debt continued to rise, and interest rates were hoisted ...”

“... to cut costs, and not just by laying off workers. In The Queen of the Trent, published in 2009 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Cottam power station in Nottinghamshire, Robert Davis quotes one of the employees: There was so much wastage during the CEGB days. It was like they had money to burn. The stores were always full and we had spares for ...”

“... time in its history. For it to fissure at the moment of withdrawal would be to put a question-mark over what all right-thinking patriots, not least such products of an imperial education as Attlee, must regard with pride as the most remarkable creative achievement of their empire. If Britain had to leave India, India should be as Britain had forged ...”

“... to 1859, to crush Chechen resistance. When tsarism collapsed in the First World War, the Chechens rose up for their independence, and when the Second World War came, Stalin deported them en masse to Central Asia, where one out of every three died. Against this background, there was no chance that Chechens would submit to the Russian Federation that Yeltsin ...”

“... of her as Graham’s wife was still expected of her. The la-di-da voice had to be kept up to the mark. The drinking needed a bit of discipline even if the parties never stopped. The returns, on the other hand, were fewer. There was nothing like the same degree of ease. Colin’s cars broke down, his plans were erratic and in London his parents were too close ...”

“... together with ‘Why should we buy Chinese steel, we’ve got our own?’ Sparring, our voices rose. Partly I still felt raw after the referendum result. But partly my discomfort was towards the institution I was defending, because I couldn’t disagree that, in this case, the EU had let the people of Keynsham down badly. ‘How many billion pounds did it ...”

“... unpronounceable beginning with a hiss and the name of Sylvester was conferred on him. His wife was Rose Waxman, a sister of two leading Yiddish actors, Maurice and Fanny Waxman, whose roles on the London and New York stages included Hamlet and Medea. My father was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, grew up in Darlington, and always had a slight Northern accent. He ...”

“... for tens of thousands of people.’Other female obsessives work in austere isolation. The late Rose E.B. Coombs MBE, former Special Collections Officer at the Imperial War Museum, is the author of Before Endeavours Fade: A Guide to the Battlefields of the First World War (1976 and 1994). Miss Coombs’s bleak volume, illustrated with her own amateur ...”

“... the young Napolitano opted for the coming force of communism. Joining the PCI in late 1945, he rose rapidly through its ranks, reaching the Central Committee in just over a decade. When Russian troops and tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolt in 1956, he applauded. ‘The Soviet intervention has made a decisive contribution, not only to preventing Hungary ...”