“... for more than flashes of self-revelation. More recently, we have the eccentric cameos of Richard Cobb and causeries of A.J.P. Taylor, of which he said they were evidence that he had run out of historical subjects. In all, in the genre for which it seems so well designed, the craft of the historian has yielded perhaps only two classics – Gibbon’s ...”

“... needed salvation.’ In 2009, in a speech at Chatham House, the then chief of the general staff, Richard Dannatt, said: There is recognition that our national and military reputation and credibility, unfairly or not, have been called into question at several levels in the eyes of our most important ally as a result of some aspects of the Iraq ...”

“... the Arab revolts of the 1920s and 1930s, and would support Britain in its fight against the Axis powers. In public Ben-Gurion denounced the Mandate as a ‘half-Nazi regime’, but Britain also provided a bulwark against a Nazi invasion of Palestine, which would have necessitated a mass evacuation of the Jewish population. During the war the British ...”

“... created a National Security Council dominated by the military, which acquired wide-ranging powers. With these institutions in place, the second cycle of postwar Turkish politics was set in motion. As soon as elections were held, it became clear that the voting bloc put together by the Democrats, though at first distributed across a number of successor ...”

“... or nostalgically evoking a bygone era, it sounds a call to a new struggle against the triumphant powers of the technosciences, which are using the pretext of the death knell of the Marxist period to impose a globalised order in which man will be no more than a piece of merchandise meant for enslavement all the more bitter for being decked out as the ...”

“... of Nations because we would ‘say plainly the things that everyone is thinking and that other Powers are too cowardly to say’! (I am not sure that Irish diplomacy has lived up to the latter expectation, although de Valera’s strong but abortive stand against Italy on the Abyssinian issue 13 years later, an issue on which Britain and France caved ...”

“... by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar plantations worked by enslaved ...”

“... level-headed recent sociologist in the field, that religion is essentially an appeal to superhuman powers to avert misfortune, overcome crises and furnish salvation.3 That did not preclude admiration for the Reformers and their legacy. For Furman – an emphasis he shared with Weber, though his construction of it differed – Protestantism was the advance ...”

“... school, the one attended by David Cameron and Boris Johnson, it might seem strange to say that the powers of the lords of Norfolk have waned. But in some senses they have. They no longer wield local power over hundreds of tenants and agricultural workers and their families on their estates; commuters, retirees and second homers live in the villages now. Nor do ...”

“... football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ages by Wendy Richard of EastEnders. Back in the 1820s Gas Company funds were misappropriated, illegal payments made to council officials and stock accounts falsified. Now, in more enlightened times, when bureaucratic malpractice is exposed and celebrated every ...”

“... was another name for ‘excellence’. In the campus emergency of 1968 he even publicly endorsed Richard Nixon. In general, however, Strauss eschewed official bromide or partisan pronouncement; that was the role not of the teacher but of the taught. The veiled pole star of Strauss’s journey through the past was Nietzsche, the one modern thinker who – he ...”

“... cultural revival. Georgians were making stupendous films; the Rustaveli Theatre’s production of Richard III pulverised Edinburgh audiences who understood not a word of the language. The nation was rediscovering its past, and falling in love with what it discovered. One favourite anecdote told of a senior Georgian Communist who was expelled from the party ...”

“... world of foreign disease. The real-life archetype, who appears in two bestselling books from 1994, Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone and Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague, is the medical researcher Joe McCormick. Here he is, in Garrett’s version, being asked by the WHO in 1979 to fly from the Atlanta headquarters of the US Centres for Disease Control and ...”

“... minister. I canvassed for Labour in 1964. At Private Eye, where I used to spend a lot of time, Richard Ingrams said: ‘Why don’t you compile “The Thoughts of Chairman Harold”? Just dig out the best quotes from him, and Ralph Steadman will illustrate them.’ So my first book was compiling all those wonderful anti-imperialist quotes from Wilson – I ...”