“... two months or so in each year when Stalin was on vacation in the South and conveyed by the courier service of the OGPU to Molotov in Moscow. Molotov’s replies are rarely available. The letters are informal in style; on occasion Stalin sends greetings to Molotov’s wife (whom he later imprisoned); but these are political not personal documents. They explain ...”

“... Recent years have also seen two outstanding single-country studies of the 19th-century duel: Robert Nye’s Masculinity and Male Codes of Honour in Modern France nicely complements Ute Frevert’s Ehrenmänner (‘Men of Honour’) of 1991, a book that is close in subject-matter – although not in interpretation – to the one reviewed here. The duel ...”

“... viewed themselves as commanders-in-chief. He cites the examples of Joseph Wedgwood and Robert Owen, both faced with reducing half-savage flocks to order, both using the military metaphors beloved by men of peace (not least hymn-writers). Owen, who was criticised for marching his men from job to job in military order and drilling factory children ...”

“... cultivating men of letters, he met and greatly irritated Siegfried Sassoon and Wilde’s friend Robert Ross. On Armistice Day he was to be seen in a tail-coat in a Rolls-Royce belonging to an epicene Chilean opium addict, a pretty example of feasting with panthers. Six years of dangerous living in the theatre were capped by the succès de scandale of The ...”

“... these Protestant politicians, including Walsingham and the Queen’s favourite of favourites, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, pulled off a small victory on the domestic front. They took the Queen off to East Anglia on a progress, where they stage-managed a local political revolution which threw out of office the leading Catholics of the region and ...”

“... 1897, six Greenland Inuit, including six-year-old Minik and his father, Qisuk, were taken by Robert Peary to New York City and put on display. Peary needed money for further expeditions to the North Pole, and the Inuit, together with an iron-rich meteorite he stole from them, would attract investment for his Arctic adventures. The Inuit were, for a short ...”

“... days in pure loss and reduce the dangerous life in the virgin forest to an imitation of military service . . . That it calls for such efforts and vain expense to attain the object of our studies confers no value on what one should rather regard as the negative aspect of our métier. The truths which we travel so far to seek need to be stripped from such ...”

“... platforms, some dotted with information about a famous person from the past (Erasmus Darwin or Robert McNamara), as though a documentary script were in the making or a history seminar had just finished. Or, finally, a kiosk cobbled together from plastic and plywood, and filled, like a homemade study-shrine, with images and texts devoted to a particular ...”

“... expressed pity for the poor women on the street, but many viewed them with misogynist contempt. Robert Fabian, a former London superintendent, wrote in his memoirs that ‘the whore is a bad apple … there is a big brown bruise on her soul, of self-indulgence and selfishness.’ But traffickers and pimps were also vile: ‘the lowest form of animal life on ...”

“... philosophy and history. Foot, Midgley and Murdoch then joined the war effort by entering the civil service. Murdoch had become a communist at Oxford and was sure the civil service wouldn’t want her, not ‘with a record like mine’. But she was taken on at the Treasury, and duly copied documents which she hid in a tree in ...”

“... asshole,” Cohn said, half-joking and smacking Trump gently on his arm. Cohn turned to a Secret Service agent. “I just hit the president. If you want to shoot me, go ahead.”’ It’s the ‘half-joking’ that’s the giveaway: it’s precisely what Cohn would tell himself after the event. But it’s not just Cohn. At other points the source is clearly ...”

“... to assistant secretary of the navy and then governor of New York. But he was also affected by service in Woodrow Wilson’s administration during the First World War. As he wrote in 1935, Wilson could appeal, as TR could not, to the ‘truly profound moral and social convictions’. On the big issues of what would make a better world, FDR remained, in ...”

“... landowners. Their side of the family were all employed in domestic labour, or in a version of the service industry. Lucie’s ability to take it to the next level, but also to the next class up, was both part of the trajectory and a break from it. The Lejeunes, my grandfather’s side, were all industrial workers and they socialised together at the many ...”

“... poets in these pages – the stellar cast includes Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola ...”

“... the following morning.Short-term thinking also explains Cameron’s refusal to allow the civil service to prepare for a Leave victory, for fear it would look defeatist. After Theresa May replaced him as prime minister, it became clear that no one had any idea what to do, or even what could be done. ‘The British state had not done a shred of ...”