“... When​ Neville Chamberlain declared war in September 1939, the Conservatives had been in power for a couple of decades, interrupted only briefly by the first two Labour governments. They had been in coalition for much of that time, but had always been the dominant party, and the government formed when the second Labour administration collapsed in the wake of the 1931 financial crisis was ‘national’ in name only ...”

“... law, would provide opportunity and riches for all, and eventually consign wars, empires and great-power politics to the past. The belief that market-led development strategies would benefit everybody underpins the Washington Consensus, a set of ten policy points drawn up at the end of the Cold War, and dictates decisions at the World Economic Forum at ...”

“... are more obvious difficulties also. They can offer hardly any letters; and how well would we know Henry James or Bernard Shaw without their letters? Macey and Miller even seem not to have been allowed photographs, apart from a jacket-illustration, as though someone had placed a ban on these. At all events one does not, from either of their books, quite end up ...”

“... As he says in The Muse of History, he is the great-grandson of the lexicographer James Augustus Henry Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the son and grandson of senior civil servants. This genealogy of scholarly and public service is important to the book, in which questions of kinship and filiation – whether of the blood or ...”

“... fighting only in self-defence. According to a patriotic broadside of 1803, the French fight for Power, for Plunder, and extended Rule – WE, for our Country, our Altars, and our Homes. – They follow an ADVENTURER, whom they fear – and obey a Power which they hate – WE serve a Monarch whom we love, a GOD whom we ...”

“... more efficiency.’ He had a clear-eyed but grim understanding of what the Nazi seizure of power meant for the rest of Europe. In a long piece on 11 April, he wrote that whatever Hitler might say about wanting peace, it was entirely conditional on Germany getting back ‘most of what she lost through the war of 1914-18’. While Hitler was speaking ...”

“... effective defences against thermonuclear weapons have been hard to come by. Instead, their very power has constrained their use. War has always been destructive for the losers. It’s sometimes destructive for the victors too: the Soviet Union lost 13 per cent of its population in the Second World War. But until the invention of nuclear weapons, victory ...”

“... of foreign nationals not surprisingly had a powerful effect. Guantánamo symbolised the primacy of power over law in a way that threatened not only the hapless detainees, but every other country in the world. It seemed to say that the US considered itself free to ignore any legal constraint it deemed an obstacle to its interests. The reasons for international ...”

“... But what do we do with Anthony Blunt? Here was no mere polemicist but an agent of an enemy power whose commitment lasted not for a few months but for his entire adult life. Here was a man whose influence over scholars, students and art professionals was both profound and frighteningly discrete – so discrete, in fact, that a good part of the ...”

“... government’. It is set in the reign of the ‘Citizen King’ Louis-Philippe, brought to power by the Revolution of July 1830: France has a constitutional monarchy, a Chamber of Deputies, a legal republican party, a free press, and some people have the right to vote. Hence the need for hypocrisy and lies. The Prince of Parma can rely on his secret ...”

“... We name things in order to have power over them; but we must also name them to cower before them in worship. Novelists in particular are aware of the paradoxical magic of naming. To the narrative theorist, stories are made up of simple structural units, like biological cells endlessly replicating: but the novelist, who takes possession of the story by giving names to its narrative agents and formulae, is like Glendower conjuring spirits from the vasty deep but not knowing if they will come at his call ...”

“... and that. My mother had drawn or painted every day of her life, faithful to the exhortations of Henry Tonks at the Slade. Betty’s tone as she paraphrases and comments on my account of my position is initially approving: Questioned as to her own private reaction at this giving up of her rights, one young woman most unexpectedly answered – ‘I love ...”

“... police department, both designed in part to undermine the corrupt Democratic mayor’s power base: Irish immigrants and the saloons that were their essential political institution. A state supreme court decision on 3 July in favour of the legislature had seemed to mark the end of local misrule. But the riot that occurred late in the afternoon of ...”

“... perhaps treasonable alliances. With conspicuous exceptions such as John Selden and the republican Henry Marten, the MPs who put secular anxieties before religious ones were more likely to fight for the King than for Parliament. Members preoccupied with ‘further reformation’, though in 1642 ready to fight the King to get their way, had earlier been willing ...”

“... logic and anti-war campaigning, and notably not for family life. It was all done on will-power. She had been reluctant to marry her husband, the statesman better known as Lord John Russell (or ‘Finality Jack’) than as the First Earl Russell, for he was 48 to her 25 when they married in 1841, and nobody supposed she ever loved the man to whom she ...”