“... humiliating treaty and forced it to pay exorbitant reparations, enabling the rise of the Nazis to power. In this version the 1920s were merely the interlude before the consequences of a deeply flawed and wicked peace came home to roost. It is much too simple an explanation of course – apart from anything else what was everyone doing in those years? – and ...”

“... political and intellectual group. Did the gradual exclusion of the secular Left from political power, and from the revolution, prove that there never was a revolution – only a transfer of power between traditional elites? All these questions expose failures in communication, of which we can make ourselves aware without ...”

“... France and on to post-imperial Britain, a figleaf of civilisation trying to hide a loss of power. It remains true that for those able to play it the heritage card is a winner: the aristocracy is fortunate in finding itself on the receiving end of the national nostalgia trip and its idealisation of the country life. There is, nevertheless, something ...”

“... How did such a man overthrow a clever politician like Dr Milton Obote? Why was he able to stay in power so long? What does his rule portend for the future of Uganda? George Ivan Smith’s book answers none of the key questions about ‘the rise and fall of Idi Amin’ but most of the answers are in G.S. Ibingira’s African Upheavals since Independence. Grace ...”

“... a buffoon who built his castles in the wrong place as the result of a failure to understand sea-power. Bannockburn and Edward II get a fair hearing for a book on naval history, but real venom is reserved for Edward III: Southampton burned by the Genoese, and the king, like his father, ‘For want of a professional fleet ... for ever three months behind the ...”

“... widely used in poor countries: in India, as recently as 1981, animals produced more megawatts of power than all mechanised sources combined, and there were twice as many bullock carts as there had been at independence in 1947. Even in the United States, Amish farmers continue to work with horses, and there seem to be tens of thousands of non-Amish farmers ...”

“... marriages. An Italian version had already been commissioned in 1607 by the scholarly diplomat Sir Henry Wotton as English ambassador in Venice, in an optimistic bid to cash in on a bitter stand-off between the Serene Republic and the pope by converting the Venetians to the Church of England. Portuguese came later, in 1695, and that translation ...”

“... offensive of the Westminster executive against its restraints: against rival centres of power in Brussels or Edinburgh, against plural interpretations of history, against law itself. Most British governments since Thatcher’s have sought to stamp out what they see as a spreading ‘European heresy’: the notion that supreme law should stand above ...”

“... Schröder probably also liked that business and ‘civil society’ – encouraged by the likes of Henry Kissinger and other prominent palace lobbyists – had promised to contribute substantial amounts.The driving force behind the reconstruction was a private individual, Wilhelm von Boddien, a Hamburg-based entrepreneur who had made his money in tractors and ...”

“... rulers. The former, Gilmour contends, is more often than not a consequence of the latter. Those in power naturally deny this connection: not out of cynicism or oppressiveness necessarily, but because they are out of touch or arrogant or simply blinkered by their own propaganda. ‘Marvelling at the skilful beneficence of their own rule, they are convinced that ...”

“... a ‘major effort’ to acquire nuclear weapons. According to evidence gathered by Congressman Henry Gonzalez and now publicly available in Washington, US intelligence sources were feeding Iraq with sensitive information only weeks before the invasion of Kuwait. At the same time, senior Administration officials went out of their way to cover up evidence ...”

“... were living in Rome. And that phrase ius divinum had some very sinister overtones for the papacy: Henry VIII had used it to justify his deeply self-righteous claim that he had never married a lady called Katherine of Aragon, and that God was very angry with him, both for having mistakenly thought that he had done so, and for allowing the pope to provide a ...”

“... tenacity, and a tenacity of craft, which eventually enabled Shelley to write poetry of singular power and originality. The new edition reveals this consistency. In gathering together all his earliest pieces, including some that have been unavailable in standard editions of the collected poetry, Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat’s meticulously edited volume ...”

“... of the Mughal court. Yet he was the ambassador of James VI and I, who had advised his heir, Prince Henry, in Basilicon Doron (1599) that ‘a king is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures all the people gazingly do behold.’Ten months after the audience at Ajmer, Jahangir’s favoured son, Khurram, presented Roe with a gold cloak ‘once ...”

“... a thesaurus for The Media Casebook, while Sage spins around the colon to distinguish Culture and Power: A Media, Culture & Society Reader from Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader. For the benefit of anyone who hadn’t picked up on the family resemblance, Finkelstein and McCleery call their anthology of ‘book history studies’ ‘a vital ...”