“... the Russian Revolutions of 1917. The Bolsheviks, unlikely winners of power that looked precarious, held the centre of the country, while White armies supported by the Allies dominated Russia’s peripheries. Sixteen countries were involved in the intervention to some degree, not counting British and French colonial troops (a term which Reid uses to cover ...”

“... liked Germany and negotiated the concordat did not mean, however, that he was a crypto-Nazi. As David Kertzer concludes in his new book, ‘Pope Pius XII was certainly not “Hitler’s Pope” … In many ways, the Nazi regime was anathema to the pope and to virtually all those around him in the Vatican. They were alarmed by the Reich’s efforts to weaken ...”

“... for tourist buses. Tourism was a necessary theology, and all along the river-road breakaway sects held their own dances and had their own tin-roofed churches and stalls of trinkets. This was a highly competitive market economy, without the traditional raids and kidnappings. I remembered Herzog’s creed, as reported by Bruce Chatwin: ‘Walking is a ...”

“... sent to Oxford to acquire British accents and a pseudo-patrician indifference to book-keeping, David Niven Oriental-style. In Mori’s time a middle-rank Foreign Ministry official was caught using secret funds to keep a string of racehorses, yachts and a mistress in a smart apartment – outraging Japanese voters worried about their jobs. Scandal followed ...”

“... had made the scurrilous claim that ‘negroes’ could be proclaimed ‘subjects of the realm, and held entitled to all the rights, liberties, and privileges of natural, or free-born subjects’. The nation was supported by its trade, he argued, and British commerce and opinion ‘esteemed Negroe labourers merely a commodity, or chose in merchandise ...”

“... been open opposition to the last ceasefire. An Islamist Pakistani captain refused to vacate Indian-held territory. A colonel despatched by the Pakistani High Command to order an immediate withdrawal was shot dead as a traitor to Islam. Already a partial wreck, Pakistan could be destroyed by a civil war. The terrorists who carried out the killings in the US ...”

“... bleach), the clip-on dark-glasses worn at all times, the cigarette in the corner of the mouth or held in the hand in such a way that the smoke would turn his fingers oak-brown, the felt hat, dark shirt and light tie, which gave him a gangsterish appearance, though more Guys and Dolls Runyonesque than High Sierra Bogartian. I knew, too, that he was queer (the ...”

“... known as the periphery doctrine, put in place in the 1950s by Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and the first heads of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. The strategy’s basic premise was that Israel faced a proximate ‘core’ of implacable Arab hostility, which could be countered only through action at its ...”

“... attention came when Goldsmith himself stood in the 1997 general election in Putney against David Mellor, the cabinet minister who had been caught having an affair with an actress. Her fuck-and-tell story ran in the tabloids and included the fictional detail that (to quote the front page of the Sun) ‘Mellor Made Love in Chelsea Strip’. In a ...”

“... Dáil. During the next two years, both the SDLP (publicly) and the Irish Government (privately) held meetings with the Republican leadership. Then, in November 1989, the new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, publicly admitted that it was ‘difficult to envisage the military defeat’ of a force such as the IRA ‘because of the ...”

“... in a delicate copperplate hand, ‘The daughter of Admiral Walker’, followed by a signature: ‘David Wilkie f-t 1840’. Near her there used to hang another portrait, of a fantastical fellow in a high tarbush with a long, dangling plume, his chest puffed out in his dress uniform, with prominent epaulettes, medals at his throat and a long scimitar cradled ...”

“... his 35 years at Netherne. This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these ...”

“... no new taxes’ Bush, and Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton. David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, hammered home the point in the course of his peroration during last winter’s impeachment proceedings: ‘The President, then, has lied under oath in a civil deposition, lied under oath in a ...”

“... internally united entity, the Great Isle is finished, and ready to recede back into the shape it held at roughly the mid-term of its broken past. He also makes it seem incomprehensible that the divided bits of the former Britain – and England above all – should imagine they either have, or need to lust after, a future separated from the Continent, all in ...”

“... Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and got into fights on Tottenham Court Road. It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg and William Roberts – and a ...”