“... France and China to retain nuclear weapons, has been gradually eroded, as Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea and, briefly, apartheid South Africa, have unofficially joined the club. Now Iran, too, may be trying to develop the bomb, and has threatened to withdraw from the treaty, as North Korea did in 2003. Iran’s ...”

“... skins. In 1817, when Delano’s book was published, most politicians and intellectuals in both the North and the South agreed on the abstract wrongs of slavery, but not on the way to abolish it. In 1855, when Melville wrote ‘Benito Cereno’, Southern politicians no longer acknowledged slavery as an evil (even a necessary one), arguing that it spared whites ...”

“... Someone clearly had it in for Sony. But who? The FBI pointed the finger at China’s ally North Korea: Sony was about to release The Interview, a comedy involving an assassination attempt on Kim Jong-un. But the attack was astonishingly sophisticated. An official from the FBI’s Cyber Division was reported as saying that the malware used could get ...”

“... billion in imports and exports pass through here every year. Big container ships, heading north or south, stand out against the French coast. Nicolas Deshayes – an artist who lives on the hill, just below Henry II’s magnificent 12th-century castle, the largest in England – revels in the spectacle of choreographed movement. He makes works that ...”

“... another five years, despite continuing tensions over loan repayments and the warning of its boss, John Hope Simpson, a former Indian Civil Service official, that the ‘unpleasant duty’ of debt collection and mass evictions would ‘probably lead to revolution’. Yet the League continued to roll out unpopular debt-led development projects. In the early ...”

“... on their lives before autumn 1888. Crippen may be the name forever associated with the ‘North London cellar murder’, but here he is treated by Rubenhold as one character in ‘an ensemble cast brought together to tell a more panoramic and human version of one of the most infamous crimes of the early 20th century’. Chiefly, she tells the life ...”

“... always remember where facts ended and conjecture began – the commercial life of ancient North Africa. This manic thoroughness was no penance but a comfort, because long immersion in such alien matter was what Flaubert needed if he wasn’t to succumb to his indignation at the world around him: ‘If I go so slowly, it is because a book for me is a ...”

“... the Airbus 380, which is made in Wales. (They’re so big that they travel from the Dee estuary in North Wales to Pauillac on the Gironde estuary on a specially built roll-on roll-off ship.) This industrial work is high-skill, high-value, and doesn’t provide mass employment; it’s a lot like the kind of service work which thrives in London and the ...”

“... and Montenegrins in Albanian-dominated Kosovo, in order to crush his political rivals in Belgrade. John Major’s Government chipped in with a contribution much later on. After resolutely opposing the premature recognition of Croatia and Slovenia on the grounds that this would provoke the outbreak of war in Bosnia, the Major Government capitulated a day before ...”

“... War (‘when the puppet government of South Korea was being egged on by the USA to start war on North Korea’) and the Soviet Union’s diplomatic blunder in continuing at this juncture to boycott meetings of the UN Security Council, in protest over the refusal of the UN to give a seat to Red China. He relates that when fighting broke out in June 1950, he ...”

“... the late 1960s was yet another mysterious Kondratieff wave. We could have sensed the presence of North Sea oil and not worried about ‘the difficulties of the occasional British deficit’. We need never have intervened in the economy at all. Yet we should also have had an incomes policy much sooner than we tried to do, we should have raised the status of ...”

“... of Christian belief for English thought from Kingsley onwards is receiving attention again, and John Vincent illuminated the historical career of G.M. Trevelyan in exactly that way in the London Review of Books last year. The different social trajectory of Edward Carpenter bears out this analysis, for all the sociological distinctions. It isn’t ...”

“... narrative, and something to the dynamics of contemporary bookselling and the vogue of the Pacific North-West. The book got off to a respectable start in hardcover – it was a good ‘Christmas book’ because of its title and woodsy cover art, the author told Publisher’s Weekly – but it was not until it began to win prizes, including the PEN/Faulkner and ...”

“... numbers, and was accustomed to make confident statements entirely without adequate data.’ So John Wyclif’s claim in the 1370s that Oxford had once had 60,000 students but that after the Black Death the number had fallen to fewer than 3000 can be confidently dismissed. The estimate of 98,000 post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq, made by Les Roberts and ...”

“... The history of England,’ Sir John Seeley declared in The Expansion of England (1883), ‘is not in England but in America and Asia.’ Like many aphorisms, this was at once consciously perverse and entirely apt. Seeley wrote as a fervid supporter of imperial federation, ‘Greater Britain’, but he was also taking issue, as in a preceding series of lectures delivered at Cambridge, with the introspection that characterised so much contemporary English historical writing ...”