“... even heard of an IED before I came to Iraq.’ Outside the hut, Sgt Anderson showed off an old green-painted 155mm South African-made shell, whose TNT is wrapped around with plastic explosives; it produces razor-edged pieces of shrapnel eight to twelve inches long. The guerrillas bury several of these a few feet from the road with the nose of the shell ...”

“... In 1933, Hourani went up to Oxford, to read PPE: ‘a very thin young man with luminous green eyes and a diaphanous complexion’, according to his friend Charles Issawi. After graduating, he worked for Chatham House and the Foreign Office, before becoming a fellow of Magdalen and subsequently director of the Middle East Centre at St ...”

“... travel. It is the internal passport, an instrument of state control like the identity cards that David Blunkett is planning for us. Until 2002 it recorded not only your name, age and address, but your ‘nationality’ as well. Our word ‘Russian’ does duty for two distinct adjectives, rossiski and russki. The Russian Federation, like the Russian Academy ...”

“... David Hume once remarked that the English had the least national character of any people in the universe. Perhaps this was a cunning Scottish put-down, since character is just what the English pride themselves on. They may not bestride the world in intellect, cuisine or emotional intimacy, but these fancy pursuits can be left to foreigners, and don’t count for much compared to their own moral robustness ...”

“... next to trousers and a towel in the same colour; a bedspread with red and yellow hearts on it; a green plastic bottle; a grey girls’ top; a black T-shirt with a white Eiffel Tower motif; a child’s thermal vest. The Mexican authorities said all the survivors were adults. The next day a third body, belonging to another male, was discovered by fishermen on ...”

“... at the best of times – failed to perceive their good fortune; they still don’t.Although David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had played a central role in negotiating the agreement, many unionists believed they had been conned. While the agreement won the near unanimous endorsement of nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was ...”

“... a disunited nation, a task force could not have been proposed. Yet Labour had appeared to signal green, before there had been an opportunity for reflection within the Shadow Cabinet as a whole, let alone the Parliamentary Party, or the Party in the country. Had the military occupation taken place on a Monday to Thursday when Parliament was sitting, I believe ...”

“... in the Nagorno-Karabakh war of 2020. Aliyev’s government has announced plans to establish ‘green energy zones’ across the territory it seized – territory which the UK’s current foreign secretary, David Lammy, has referred to as having been ‘liberated’. Gary Jones, BP’s regional president for ...”

“... the lamps, makes it hard to rediscover what his fiancée looks like. In time, ‘the advancing green tide’ engulfs the area uncontested and roots from overgrown tropical shrubs penetrate the foundations. The beds are never changed, the food is unpleasant, whole wings are made uninhabitable by storm damage and on his first night the Major finds a rotting ...”

“... to moral discourse and retaining a distinctly clerical air. The Labour guru in postwar Oxford was David Worswick, the well-known economist, not David Worick, as he appears both in the text and the index. By no stretch of the imagination can the students of T.H. Green be said to have ...”

“... synonyms every week. It was with characteristic British reserve, though, that Lieutenant-Colonel David Morgan, Commandant of the 1st Battalion of the Seventh Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Riders, set about straightening things out. The Gurkhas are the British soldiers whom, in an ugly slur, Garcia Marquez accused of committing almost unprintable ...”

“... the Soviet state and the death camps of the Nazis: the latter journey, accompanying a young boy, David, and the woman who looks after him on the journey, Sofya Levinton, I found that I could not reread. The horror is all the more real because we have actually witnessed the gas chambers being built, and an inspection visit by Eichmann. A small surprise had ...”

“... Europe, would come to the Zam Zam, sometimes for the martinis but usually to be thrown out. When David Letterman came to town to do a week of shows his advance people phoned Bruno to see if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s ...”

“... exile was a traumatic experience, whose grip on his personality would tighten over the years. As David Kertzer shows in this subtle and brilliantly told account, the exile of Pius IX was an event that shaped modern Europe. The revolution that broke out in Rome in the spring of 1848 had begun not with protests, but with jubilation. Little was known of ...”

“... resisters; recrossed the pond in time to join the 1963 March on Washington. Disguised as ‘Saul Green’, he even found his way into one of his era’s major works of fiction, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. On his first night in London, Sigal, an illegal immigrant, slept in Trafalgar Square, where ‘yobbos in thick-soled boots kicked the crap out ...”