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“... After. That work made nonsense of the notion, fostered by Israel’s dynamic first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and his acolytes, that ‘Israel’s leaders sought desperately to make peace with one or all of the Arab states but the Arabs, hell-bent on the destruction of Israel, turned down these overtures and repaid this goodwill with continued ...”

“... of Empire by Philip Morgan. But broadly speaking, the radical historians of Empire – David Killingray, Peter Sluglett, Nicholas Tarling – have been confined to the final, historiographical volume, while the more conservative have been given the meaty chapters in the bulk of the History. The purpose of the Historiography volume is to trace ...”

“... written and of a balls-aching boredom.’ In 1960 he found something he did like. He announced to David Selznick that ‘a delightful book’ called To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was ‘going to be a great success’. He himself, he wrote, was the model for the character Dill, being a childhood friend of the author’s. The first letter in Too Brief a ...”

“... one. Except in T’ang China, that sensible civilisation, the profession of arms has always been held in honour. Despite evidence to the contrary, the soldier is still regarded as one of nature’s gentlemen. War is one of the few bonds that can cement class solidarity. The pacific hero of one of L.P. Hartley’s novels is astounded to be told by his ...”

“... sober facts (dates, names of ships, transcripts of Congressional hearings) and indignant feelings. Held in a solution of facts, the feelings were never precipitated into sentimentality: but The Other Occupant has no such protection. Its pathos does not convince, because it is rendered with self-indulgence and a writer’s self-regard. The change from A Lesser ...”

“... Many were of Irish origin. Not a single one of them could by any stretch of the imagination be held responsible for or even sympathetic to British government policy in Northern Ireland. The universal horror at this, the biggest killing of civilians in British post-war history, was to some extent assuaged when the Police announced on 24 November, three days ...”

“... this strikingly democratic segment of the International Brigade. Several claim that their officers held their position by common assent, and that policy was often preceded by debate. They expected to get wounded, and if captured they expected to get shot. The names of dead heroes reverberate through these pages, with the same executions repeatedly ...”

“... defective. Sir Edward Herbert died before the Report had been signed. Mr R.B. Southall and Sir David Anderson ‘belonged’, in Mr Carswell’s words, ‘to the silent minority’. All four members of the ‘inner group’, as Mr Carswell defines it, were academics. The most serious result of the under-representation of secondary education on the ...”

“... on a ‘have a go, Joe’ principle instead of in conformity with a clear master plan. ‘He held conferences to collect ideas,’ raged Monty. ‘I hold conferences to give orders.’ With the American debacle in the Ardennes, at the end of 1944, came Monty’s chance to fight his ‘finest defensive battle’. This is perhaps the most gripping part of ...”

“... Despite being (allegedly) pushed into an Amsterdam canal by her husband in a honeymoon quarrel she held him a besotted slave and relieved him of large sums on the pretext of planning to make films of his books. The tales that she charged him £5000 for sewing on a button and £10,000 for cutting his hair need not be taken too seriously, but the domestic ...”

“... powers – ‘one of the worst and one of the most influential ideas around’, in the opinion of David Starkey in 2019. Hobbes describes it in Leviathan as ‘a doctrine, plainly, and directly against the essence of a Common-wealth … That the sovereign power may be divided. For what is it to divide the Power of a Common-wealth but to Dissolve it? For ...”

“... strange picture-postcards. They show scenes such as that of six men, heavily veiled, veils held down by brimmed hats, posed with long-barrelled rifles. And two men in grass skirts, with feathers in their hair, intent on a game of billiards. They are Africans. And here are twenty-odd white men, in straw boaters, surrounding a prone ...”

“... not the issue. The dollar is the de facto global ‘reserve currency’, meaning that it is held in significant quantities by countries and institutions all round the world, and that it is the currency used to price the huge global markets in commodities. In effect, the dollar is the currency we earthlings prefer to use. The fact that the US can print ...”

“... outset, like some grotesque über-car the great white must perpetually keep moving. My sister then held up as evidence The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, in which Marinetti, declaring in 1909 that ‘time and space died yesterday’, describes driving his car so fast that it spins out and overturns. She noted that Marinetti repeatedly calls the vehicle a ...”

“... book spawned a new genre of British travel-writing, nicely described as ‘motoring pastoral’ by David Matless in Landscape and Englishness (1998). Motoring is imbued with an almost celestial quality in this very British yoking together of nostalgia and modernity, as if the car, for those with the means to own one, had opened up a gateway to ...”