“... but a trifling point of geography’. The dishonesty of map-makers, the credulity of men in power and the destitution of the land were robbing him of the pleasure, which he had felt so keenly on the Endeavour, of being the discoverer, ‘even was it nothing more than sands and Shoals’. Now something akin to despair set in, so that the temptation of ...”

“... diplomacy. The motivation for this expansionist gamble was Russia’s anxiety about the balance of power across Central and Eastern Europe. The Revolutions of 1848 had demonstrated that Western liberals could stimulate uprisings against the status quo in Italian, Hungarian, Polish and Balkan lands; now the Ottoman Empire, which Russia was used to bullying, was ...”

“... and prudery. He followed Taylor in belittling Northcliffe’s originality, depth and political power. Liberals hated him not because he sapped the national fibre, but because he revealed that modern British culture did not correspond to the fantasies they were used to peddling. Brendon’s essay was slick and reductionist, but in that respect it matched ...”

“... the double lens of the film and the crowd’s response to it, and overwhelmed by the simple power of a collective experience you’ve anticipated for decades, as when your mostly-losing local sports team nails a championship. I was completely beguiled from my cynicism. You may now safely consider me to have overrated the movie. But spontaneous applause ...”

“... there were times when I warmed to Life of a Drum, lacking though it is in the stylishness and power of Hoffman’s or Cunningham’s books, because it represents the experience of a ‘normal’ life without condescension or evasion, without devaluing it in relation to the prestige of ‘alternative’ lives. There is a real sympathy and imaginative truth ...”

“... Beria, Malenkov or Molotov as the new dictator. Surprise at the outsider Khrushchev’s rise to power was exceeded only by that at his sudden fall in 1964. Brezhnev, on the other hand, gave observers plenty of time to identify his successor. Shelepin, Suslov, Mazurov, Kirilenko and Chernenko were among the candidates favoured at various times by the Western ...”

“... occur?’ and ‘Why did the Nazis meet with no effective opposition in their seizure of power?’ Evans is keenly aware of the twin sirens of modern German history: on the one hand, the lure of determinism (German history leads inevitably to Nazism); on the other, the illusion of contingency (Hitler was an accident). Similarly, there is a balance to ...”

“... prepped him at his interview in New York: ‘If poor and working-class people want to build real power, they have to have some sort of institutional base. With the unions in the shape they’re in, the churches are the only game in town.’ In Chicago, a black pastor extolled the church as ‘an example of segregation’s hidden blessings’: … the way it ...”

“... that his career ended in disgrace, and also in the more important and longer-term sense that the power and prestige of the Spanish monarchy declined (despite his efforts, or even because of them), while France rose. The ‘planet king’, Philip IV, was eclipsed by the sun of Louis XIV. History, or the historian at any rate, has little patience with ...”

“... coalition strengthened by small groups of defecting Labour and Liberal MPs. This alliance came to power as a result of pressure from the Treasury and the Bank of England for dramatic cuts to public spending, pressure that most members of the minority Labour government elected in 1929 refused to accept, resigning instead. The Labour prime minister, Ramsay ...”

“... well-charted weaknesses. His Melbourne is as monochrome as he is unlikeable, deficient in will-power, dominated by women and left emotionally frozen by his disastrous marriage. He entered politics for amusement and diversion, and, lacking vision or social sympathy, was as spineless there as in private life. He died lonely and embittered, rendered unable to ...”

“... as the human race survives. Second, he thought that previous idealists had construed the formative power of the human mind too narrowly, confining themselves to the prosaic, reactive processes of ‘intellect’ and ‘representation’ and overlooking a more fundamental poetic faculty which he called ‘symbolisation’. There were three main forms of ...”

“... need to protect themselves from the corrosive effects of capitalism and the depredations of state power.’ However much one may applaud MacIntyre’s concern with injustice, and agree that there are conditions of contemporary life that facilitate indifference to it, it is hard not to conclude that his critique has taken a serious wrong turn here. For ...”

“... for many years, but until this spring I had never been to one where the Communists had won power in a nationwide multi-party poll that international observers judged broadly free and fair. Moldova is unique. The old nomenklatura still rules half the former Soviet republics, from Central Asia to Azerbaijan and Belarus, not to mention Russia itself. But ...”

“... one of the greatest books ever written. In the second he was a sleek London gentleman wallowing in power, wealth and prestige and devoting his intellectual energy to esoteric studies of the Bible. How could they be the same person? Newton’s first biographer, Jean-Baptiste Biot, proposed the classic solution in 1822: Newton was ‘the greatest of mankind in ...”