“... was to discover when I took part in the negotiations as a legal adviser. Incidentally, I remember Edward Said coming to Washington to offer his services to the delegation only to be sent away. He could have played a crucial role, explaining to the American public what these negotiations were about. What sort of leadership refuses an offer like ...”

“... newly translated by Royall Tyler. Tyler is the most prominent translator since Arthur Waley and Edward Seidensticker to take on the Sisyphean task of rendering Japan’s vast classical literature into accessible English. The Tale of the Heike is an especially challenging work for Western audiences. The Tale of Genji, with its eerily Proustian anatomisation ...”

“... translations supplied by James Hardiman, John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry, John O’Daly, Edward Walsh, Samuel Ferguson and other sources. It is impossible to know how Mangan could have written so many poems and essays in a few years beset by poverty, illness, drunkenness and what he himself called ‘moral insanity’. Mangan’s place in Irish ...”

“... Verses Rhyming in lam of the Non-Arabs’, was translated by the 17th-century Orientalist Edward Pococke. Perhaps the most famous Arab author to be mentioned by Leo was al-Hariri, and in the next century the Dutch scholar Erpenius went on to translate the elaborate prose of the first chapter of al-Hariri’s Maqamat. In each chapter of this, the ...”

“... into being ‘after native men and women were kicked out of their homes to make way for one of Edward I’s imposing ring of castles’. It may have happened seven hundred years ago, but it still grates. Today the English come to Wales not with weapons but with bank balances that enable them to buy second homes. And there is still resistance. Between 1979 ...”

“... the Socialist Party of America under Norman Thomas and perhaps, at university, an admirer of the young militants whose star rose in the party during the early 1930s. Lois sends a funny letter to her family in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a Trotskyist’: ‘Lady, I ain’t no Trotskyist. You should read up on the ...”

“... with Nehru, who was in prison. When Nehru came to tea her father introduced her, saying: ‘My young daughter, alas, is a great admirer of yours.’ In a later exchange of letters Nehru explained Indian history to her, and told her what a good thing it was that she was being radicalised. Scared that her father might see these letters, she destroyed ...”

“... more radically terrifying precedents for the development of the infant American Republic, and Edward Genêt, France’s first minister to the United States, began to enlist Americans in the work of spreading revolution in Europe, American thinkers and writers came to react against the world they themselves had turned upside down. They did this, according ...”

“... invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also holy for Palestinians’ and ‘History repeats itself: yesterday Nero, today Sharon.’ Torches alight and banners ...”

“... to marry them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of ...”

“... This unglamorous bureaucracy helped to revolutionise the possible length of a sea voyage. Admiral Edward Boscawen wrote to his wife in 1756 that ‘this ship has now been at sea twelve weeks, which is longer than I ever knew any first-rate at sea … At the beginning of the Spanish War our cruisers would not keep the sea above a fortnight, till one or two of ...”

“... road out east to Wellington, a few miles from the centre of Freetown, was good. I took it with Dr Edward Nahim, a consultant psychologist and lecturer supervising a rehabilitation project for former under-age combatants in rebel militias, government forces and semi-autonomous units. There was room for roughly a hundred ...”

“... of their oppressors’ history: the destruction of European Jewry conferred moral capital on the young Jewish state in the eyes of the Western powers. The Palestinian claim of genocide seemed like a bid to even the score, something that words such as ‘occupation’ and even ‘apartheid’ could never do.This time it’s different, however, not only ...”

“... calls him a ‘sissy’, which is about right, though, oddly, Cissy is the name of the pitiless young woman Sainty is trapped into marrying. Sturgis never makes any play on this lurking pun, though as a treacherous and neglectful wife Cissy is a constant taunting reminder of Sainty’s sissiness. The great moment for Sainty comes early on, when the boys are ...”

“... to the Party’s wish for change at the top and in serving under his successor. That successor was Edward Heath, the first leader to be elected under elaborate new rules adopted by the Conservative Party in 1965. Those rules, given a further twist ten years later by none other than lord Home himself, set a formidable threshold of support for victory in the ...”