“... 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 ...”

“... to the British after the war, he stayed on as a ‘native accounts clerk’ – a post he held for the rest of his working life. He retired to Nyasaland in 1943 and died in 1945. I know all this because Mdala, writing mostly from the town of Tukuyu in the Rungwe district of Tanganyika, kept up a voluminous correspondence (all type-written) from the ...”

“... pound standards.) The guns won the day. The weather did the rest.After the battle, Medina Sidonia held a council of war on his battered, blood-stained flagship. His surviving officers agreed to turn about and fight again. But on 10 August he decided to cut and run: ‘a dreadful decision’, noted his deputy, Juan Martínez de Recalde, whose papers were ...”

“... did not long survive her son’s birth, and soon afterwards Ms Woolvine met and married David McCluskie, a plasterer and bricklayer. Terry took McCluskie’s name, though this was never regularised. The family moved to London after the strike at Cammell-Laird, when David McCluskie was finding work hard to come ...”

“... Neil Kinnock, he will have recalled with a shudder the 51st Annual Conference of the Labour Party, held just up the coast at Morecambe in 1952. The young Jim Callaghan spoke twice on that occasion, first against the denationalisation of road haulage by Mr Churchill’s Cabinet and then in a sharp attack on the hypocrisy of the Bevanites, who had swept to ...”