“... bad; it might be a fresh opportunity to remake the world rather than something to be dreaded. As Lord Milner, the epitome of the higher imperialism, put it in August 1919, ‘We must try to extend the Pax Britannica into a Pax Mundi.’ The British were not alone in feeling like this, for, as Susan Pedersen points out in her magnificent study, the absentees ...”

“... care to mention one – even one – attainment of the Wilson period that could bear comparison?Lord Melbourne’s over-used but pungent observation about the Order of the Garter, that he liked it because there was ‘no damned merit in it’, is very necessary for any consideration or reconsideration of the Wilson phenomenon. If he represented anything at ...”

“... The brothers Harmsworth launched the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror while Scott was wrestling with Home Rule for Ireland and the Boer War. Later, as Lords Northcliffe and Rothermere, their proprietorial arrogance and political manoeuvring became a legend. As Scott approached retirement, Lord Beaverbrook was making the Daily ...”

“... dams and mines to another British citizen, Baron Reuter (founder of the news agency). Even Lord Curzon was appalled twenty years later when he was told the terms, describing it as ‘the most complete surrender of the entire resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has ever been dreamed of much less accomplished in history’. Protests by ...”

“... bit better than the Israelites under a thoroughly godly Protestant monarch like James I. To hammer home the point, the 1611 book devoted a whole page to the royal arms, just like the big heraldic display which congregations would see proudly affixed to the wall of their parish church as they sat in their pews (in careful hierarchical arrangement), listening to ...”

“... first British poet to have been keen on boxing and, apparently, quite good at it: we may think of Lord Byron and Robert Graves. But few others, surely, have written and worried so concernedly about the ethics of this sport, its moral justification. Ring of Truth, his first novel since The Big Time in 1965, returns hungrily to Scannell’s old problem. Can ...”

“... how. From 1942, according to the Tusas, the British Government and bureaucracy had concluded (the Lord Chancellor, Simon, scrupling half-heartedly) that the major war criminals should not be tried, but put to death by executive action. Much was made of the precedent of the relegation of Napoleon to St Helena by a decision of the Congress of Vienna. The Tusas ...”

“... arose from the reforming ideals that Buxton shared with the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, and the Colonial Under-Secretary James Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s grandfather), with his Clapham Sect faith in the brotherhood of man. In the words of the historian Manning Clark, Stephen had come to the conclusion that ‘convicts and their ...”

“... human personality, Orlando catches far more of Lady Mary than her travels east or her quarrels at home. As with Orlando, the difficulty of knowing her is compounded by gaps and contradictions in the record. Though it was not true, as Lady Mary once claimed, that she ‘never printed a single line in my Life’, both her class and her sex fed her profound ...”

“... written about culpability on the British side, in particular the claim that Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, deliberately sacrificed the Lusitania to draw the United States into the war. Both Diana Preston and David Ramsay deal briskly and effectively with this. Churchill and Jackie Fisher, the First Sea ...”

“... units reporting dependency rates above 50 per cent. Many soldiers brought their heroin habit back home. The US government refused to acknowledge the connection with the opium trade in the Golden Triangle and blamed the epidemic in the US on Turkish poppy fields. A drug epidemic expedited by war gave the Nixon administration a useful alibi for its War on Drugs ...”

“... something to do with imprisonment, torture and forced labour? One might even wonder whether, back home, Prospero will experience the uneasy notion that he’s never actually been to a desert island at all: that the redemptive colonial fantasy has been played out in his own civilised brain. Just as bewildering is finding civilisation where you weren’t ...”

“... cause. Wondering what had happened to her holiday, his wife said goodbye to Berlin and returned home. Above all, these letters provide a stunning social history of the boom and bust economy of the early Victorian age. As a young man Cobden made a lot of money, and even by the tigerish standards of the day made it very quickly. By the time he was 32 he was a ...”

“... brushing a fly away from her sleeping baby’. And Hera, after quarrelling with Zeus, runs back home to Olympus like an idea that flashes in the mind of a man who has travelled far and wide, and thinks in his mind’s awareness, ‘I wish I were in that place, or this,’ and imagines many things; so swiftly travelled Hera in her haste, a goddess. The ...”

“... off ordinary people. Walter Scott, part of a cavalry troop raised to ensure stability on the home front, the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, found his conscience troubled when he was confronted in the line of duty with the looting of a bread shop: ‘Truth to say it was a dreadful feeling to use violence against a people in real and absolute ...”