“... of diplomacy are placed in a wider context.In 1836, John Stuart Mill claimed in an essay that Lord Melbourne’s government had become ‘smitten with the epidemic disease of Russophobia’, an irrational panic that had triggered an unnecessary increase in defence spending. ‘Russophobia’ has never quite left British public debate since then. It was ...”

“... by them. One example was familiar and acceptable to Charles Darwin: the successive offspring of Lord Morton’s mare. Crossed with a quagga (a now extinct zebra with stripes confined to neck and forequarters), the Arab mare delivered a hybrid with stripes in evidence. Subsequently mated with a black Arab stallion, the mare again produced an offspring ...”

“... unfolding storyline, costs millions of dollars per episode to make, and seems largely intended for home-recording or DVD viewers, who will trouble to watch it in sequence. It is on billboards and the sides of buses everywhere and the puff interviews are inescapable (its network, AMC, has never had a hit show to publicise before). The first series ran on BBC4 ...”

“... the state rooms of Norddeutscher Lloyd liners. Yet, as Despina Stratigakos observes in Hitler at Home, Hitler considered him ‘the greatest architect to grace German soil since Karl Friedrich Schinkel’. Most members of the German architectural trade had, during the Weimar Republic, turned to international modernism or Expressionism. Hitler was hardly ...”

“... high-tech civilisation – but it grew New Wavier as the series developed. The Pastel City, about Lord tegeus-Cromis’s struggle to save his homeland from brain-stealing monsters, is written in a clear and direct style reminiscent of Robert Howard (the inventor of Conan the Barbarian): ‘Tegeus-Cromis, sometime soldier and sophisticate of Viriconium, the ...”

“... Marxist Group members led to the party’s implosion soon afterwards. Sillars found a new home in the SNP, and by the late 1980s his idea of ‘independence in Europe’ had become the keystone of the party’s strategy for a reassuringly non-separatist form of independence. (By a further irony, Sillars has in the past decade reverted to a Lexit ...”

“... from friends, charged to his mother’s account, and lived reluctantly though luxuriously at home while he earned two bits an hour cleaning engine parts in a local aviation firm. ‘He’d then take his lunch from a fitted wicker picnic basket that held sandwiches with their crusts removed by the Norwegian cook, a linen napkin, and a fruit knife.’ He ...”

“... motorway. She looked quite relieved to be getting out unscathed.’ Gill has another nice capture: Lord Coe and David Cameron, flaccid ties matching the blue of the coming fence, dark suits, hands in pockets, cardinals of capital strolling through the ruins of a captured city. It was in that moment I realised the game was up for Gordon Brown: he doesn’t ...”

“... self-destruction through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch ...”

“... for an education authority to sack married women teachers on the ground that their duties lay at home or, in 1948, that it was perfectly all right for Wednesbury Corporation to use its cinema licensing powers to stop young people going to the pictures on Sundays? Not one of these decisions, each of them affecting what we would recognise now as fundamental ...”

“... it helped show that to Shakespeare, ‘as to other Elizabethans, England was something more than a home and a country: it was an inspiration. At no period in our history has the realisation of national unity been keener, the consciousness of national identity more intense.’Countless historical novels, costume dramas and schoolbooks of the early 20th century ...”

“... and Geoffrey Stephenson under the title Suspicion and Silence.* But since my disagreement with the Lord Chief Justice is on record in Hansard, I leave it there for now. The second topic, which connects to the first through the notion of fairness in how evidence is obtained, is the ‘fruit of the poisoned tree’. There is no disagreement that a conviction ...”

“... wife, Andromache, calls her maids to heat water for ‘a hot bath for Hektōr when he came home from the fighting –/unaware, in her folly, that far from all baths he’d been slain’. Inside the walls of Troy there is no problem about the presence of baths or any other amenity: it is a well-built domestic space where there is weaving and warm ...”

“... Though he spoke with an upper-class English accent, he hadn’t issued a correction when Lord Dunsany, in a review, had called him ‘an Irish sportsman’, and he had published a story in Irish Writing.Hill had moved on by the time O’Brian delivered, but his replacement, Tony Gibbs, was delighted with Master and Commander (1969). It ‘leapfrogged ...”

“... while the capacity of modern statesmen to live up to them has undergone an exponential rise since Lord Macaulay so crisply profiled Frederick ‘the Great’. Walter Isaacson’s new study of Kissinger shows beyond doubt that he rose to power by intriguing for and against an ally, the South Vietnamese military junta, whom he had sworn to defend, and that in ...”