“... Lega was already in another far-right grouping). The ECR had been the creature of the Tories since David Cameron turned his back on the mainstream conservative European Peoples Party (EPP), historically the driving force of European integration. But Brexit meant that the Conservatives didn’t contest the 2019 European election. This was another stroke of luck ...”

“... to negotiate with anyone but the emperor himself. ‘I understand that you want to negotiate peace, you who call yourself a “deputy”,’ he responded. ‘How shall I respond? You are someone else’s representative, and I am a free and autonomous man answering to none but God.’ Witbooi kept a diary that gives an important African perspective on the ...”

“... get carried away beyond the merits of an originally sound case. Why, he goes on, do writers like David Pryce-Jones want the Parisians to have behaved like the people of Warsaw? It is certainly true that, as a result of their rising, the inhabitants of Warsaw managed to get their city largely razed to the ground. If Hitler had had his way, Paris would have ...”

“... the floorboards she discovers her husband in the arms of another woman, who, much too late for the peace of all concerned, is revealed to be his sister. When Sally dreams that she has found the corpse of her first love, Peter Gow, on the battlefield, it suddenly starts up at her. She dreams that she too has been killed, and, waking, finds Gow ...”

“... a republic; the British Empire had been formally wound up in Hong Kong; and in Northern Ireland a peace process was actively resumed. This, if it gets anywhere at all by 1998, is bound to imply a more ‘neutral’ form of government in which the Crown is less prominent. Then came the accident in the Pont de I’Alma underpass. The monarchy had already been ...”

“... quotes the half-drunken Leskov as having said: ‘Thee I anoint with oil, even as Samuel anointed David … You must write.’ Like so much else in Chekhov’s work, his relation to religion is ambiguous. In a letter to Diaghilev a year before his death, he wrote: ‘I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.’ But while ...”

“... pendant on this necklace. But if he loses, and above all if a democratic Russia emerges to make peace with its neighbours, some of the statelets will explode in blood and there will be an exodus of yet more refugees. They are – from south-east to north-west – Artsakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, the two Donbas ‘republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, and ...”

“... the secrets behind better Bombs. Success in achieving either, as the physicist and historian David Kaiser has argued, depended on resolving a problem about secrecy that was at once philosophical and political. If scientific and technological knowledge was crucial, did it come in discrete units, some of which needed special protection while others were ...”

“... true poetry?’Returning to Hardy via these new selections of his work, edited by Ralph Pite and David Bromwich, I was surprised by how much I had forgotten – or misremembered. Whereas Bromwich takes his text from later editions, Pite opts for the first editions of individual volumes and provides a sampling of Hardy’s revisions in the endnotes, partly to ...”

“... all the dashers over the years, from Gerald du Maurier through John Barrymore and Ronald Colman to David Niven. I particularly enjoyed the Yorkshire TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never ...”

“... to moral discourse and retaining a distinctly clerical air. The Labour guru in postwar Oxford was David Worswick, the well-known economist, not David Worick, as he appears both in the text and the index. By no stretch of the imagination can the students of T.H. Green be said to have ‘invented’ the Fabian Society ...”

“... of utopia’. Imagine how much easier politics would be if the only thing standing in the way of peace and harmony was, as she puts it, ‘evil religious fundamentalists with guns’. You wouldn’t need to worry about capitalism or racism, your own complicity in both or either. Whether you are aunt or wife or cook or freemartin, all women are equally ...”

“... didn’t speak a word of German, needed to be occupied and annexed to the Reich.At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, Queen Marie of Romania had ‘shuddered’ to think of the possible repercussions of the ‘ghastly’ peace terms being forced on Germany. ‘I thought of the hideous suffering which would follow, of ...”

“... most of it), which should be seen as cautionary rather than exemplary. Andrew is critical of Sir David Petrie, ‘one of the service’s most successful DGs’ (at the time of the Double-Cross System during the war), for claiming that ‘too much of a past that is now remote can help but little with useful lessons,’ but Petrie may have been right in this ...”

“... but which take effect as modifications of the ancient power of controlling breaches of the peace. The judges now have a new final tier in the form of the Supreme Court, and it’s possible that some of its justices will not baulk at an assertion of local judicial power where rights are concerned, and will claim it is quite independent of the alien law ...”