“... have prevented him from becoming prime minister. In his last letter to Knox before leaving for France, he wrote: ‘I’m going to be rather odd. I’m not going to “pope” until after the war (if I’m alive).’ Volunteering for the war meant that at Oxford, as at Eton, he stayed only half the course, being ‘sent down by the Kaiser’ as he liked to ...”

“... is not the same as a whole-hearted endorsement of far-right positions. Meloni may have warned France and Germany that ‘the party is over,’ but the Fratelli are condemned to continue the ‘reforms’ started by Draghi: if Italy doesn’t meet 55 ‘milestones’ by December, Brussels won’t release the billions the country desperately needs for its ...”

“... united by their active interest in Protestantism: Marguerite gave protection to the Huguenots in France, and her own work was denounced as heretical by the Sorbonne. Over Elizabeth and Catherine fell the shadow of another woman of gifts and intelligence, who was a queen herself for a spell: Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother. In an age when Thomas More showed ...”

“... the villages dirty and charging high prices’) ‘may well encode experiences touring in France with both Ezra and Wyndham’. Furthermore, the glimpse of six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver ‘may well transcribe a fear of betrayal by the others in the gamble of making it new – with the “open door” the birth-canal of the ...”

“... The mistake which most contemporary art historians make is that they assume Modernism was born in France, in the Cubist ateliers of Braque and Picasso, in the Fauvism of Matisse. This is not so. Braque and Picasso were searching for a new way of painting, not a new way of being. Their experiment in Cubism was little more than the temporary adoption of a ...”

“... the son of her SPD colleague Clara Zetkin, an idealistic young man 15 years her junior; with Peter Levi, her defence counsel in a spectacular political trial – they had a brief and intense affair in 1914; and Hans Diefenbach, the doctor with whom she conducted her ‘last romantic affair’ in her letters from prison. Newly discovered letters enable ...”

“... of the Enlightenment dominated historical writing as late as the 1960s, and is best represented by Peter Gay’s two magisterial volumes published in 1966 and 1969. After Gay and Cassirer, two trends dominated Enlightenment history until Israel came on the scene. One situated the Enlightenment in a particular national context, giving little attention to the ...”

“... damage to the myth carefully cultivated at the time: which was that for Britain, unlike France, say, or the Netherlands, or Belgium, the process was smooth and friendly. Britain, so the story went, was freely granting self-government to its colonies as the culmination of imperial rule, which had always had this as its ultimate aim – ‘Empire into ...”

“... political views for granted, however. He could be equally difficult with Stalinists. And when Peter Hain’s group, Stop the Seventy Tour, led local anti-apartheid activists to dig up the cricket pitch in the Oxford Parks so as to sabotage the university match against the Springboks, Hodgkin was asked over and over again to sign a petition to get the ...”

“... up most of his waking life. Adherence to rules is very important. When I was walking with him in France, he remonstrated with me because I stepped on a zebra crossing when two cars were at least a hundred yards away. ‘The cars have to stop if you are on the crossing,’ he said, ‘and one of them might have driven into the back of the other.’ He only ...”

“... in a country less than a third of the size of the Russian empire. In an essay published in 1997, Peter Holquist argued that the purpose of this apparatus – which also existed in similar, if not always equally extensive, forms in fascist and liberal-democratic states – was not policing per se. The Okhrana wanted to find deviants and punish crime; the ...”

“... said in the autumn that it might have been ‘the last summer of peace for Europeans’. France’s chief of the defence staff, Fabien Mandon, laid out the stakes of rearmament more clearly than most: the coming war will force the country to ‘accept the loss of its children’ (for which it is being prepared through the introduction of voluntary ...”

“... the personages of the royal family by such names as Magnolia and Honey Suckle. She notes that in France it is perfectly correct for a woman to receive a man caller in her bedroom – a social convention that, when practised in England by a visiting Frenchwoman, makes ripples in the plot of Evelina. She laments that the French translation of her latest ...”

“... Medieval Japan, Imperial China, feudal Poland, republican Venice, caliphal Islam, absolutist France, industrial Britain, revolutionary Mexico, Stalinist Russia, populist Argentina, social-democratic Sweden, racist South Africa – all these and many more parade across what astonishingly remains a compact, middle-sized book, each deftly and economically ...”

“... to get anything done in our cumbersome and bureaucratic democracy. They point enviously to France, where things seem to happen faster, though that isn’t always the case: the TGV goes to Nice, but not yet on a high-speed line, as a result of local protests. Jim Steer is HS2’s biggest fan. The former chief railway planner at the Strategic Rail ...”