“... In a few weeks, all going well, I will get to see my Polish file. Any foreign journalist who visited Poland regularly in the Communist period must assume that the old Security Service built up a dossier on him or her. Mine is now in the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, and I can read it. I don’t know what it contains. Much irrelevant rubbish, no doubt: surveillance teams have to justify their expenses ...”

“... Anne Applebaum’s book begins with one group of women in the Polish city of Lodz and ends with another. The 45 years between the end of the Second World War and the emergence of a free, non-communist Poland separate them. But the younger women have decided to start again at the point where their elders left off – and to avoid their mistakes. In 1945, the main railway station in Lodz, like most Polish stations, was overrun by desperate refugees ...”

“... At Heligoland, passengers are landed in boats and scrutinised as they pass by numbers of the visitors who assemble to see the arrival … Heligoland, which formerly appertained to Schleswig, was ceded to England in 1807 and still continues under English supremacy … Hotels: City of London, Queen of England, Belvedere … Table d’hôte everywhere at 3 p ...”

“... In a corner​ of the eastern Mediterranean, where the coast of Anatolia turns south towards Syria, a mountain massif rises by the sea. Its name in Ottoman times was Musa Dagh, the Moses Mountain, and its summit forms a high plateau called the Damlayik. Just over a century ago, as the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was reaching its climax, four thousand Armenian villagers living round the foot of the mountain left their houses ...”

“... Afew​ months after the end of the Second World War, Stephen Spender returned to Germany. His plan was to contact German intellectuals. This was not very fruitful: most were dead or in exile, and Ernst Jünger, whom he did meet, evaded his invitation to show unqualified guilt for the Nazi past. But then Spender was asked to reopen libraries in the British zone of occupation, having first purged them of their Nazi staff and Nazi literature ...”

“... As soon as you realise how good it is, this book will frighten you. This is not just a history. It is a highly intrusive biography, especially if, like me, you belong to the British generations who were children before and during the war. When we were learning to read, Europe was a dark word, an inaccessible ‘over there’ place of suffering and menace ...”

“... The fascination exercised by the study of collaborationism on the historian (especially the Anglo-Saxon one) can be attributed partly to unfamiliarity with something outside the national experience, but, perhaps even more, to the sheer range of mutual personal situations involved.’ Even now, that Anglo-Saxon unfamiliarity remains immense. It seems, at least to me, that all the books and – especially – films of recent years about the German occupation of France, and about French behaviour during that period, have still taught the British little ...”

“... Good journalism often has a guising element in it, in which the voice of the journalist seems to come from an unexpected direction. The best journalism transcends this. But it is still true that many of the great practitioners who have written for the British or American press have been evasive about their native backgrounds and have used their trade to affect or colonise quite different ones ...”

“... In a lawless and consequently weak state, man is defenceless and unfree. The stronger the state, the freer the individual. Vladimir Putin, ‘Open Letter to Russian Voters’, 25 February 2000 The answer to ‘where have we heard that before?’ is usually: ‘in Russia.’ The notion of despotism masquerading as liberation was part of the Victorian liberal stereotype of tsardom ...”

“... For the last six months, a Scot reading the London papers, or watching London-made political TV shows, could only conclude that a sharp dislike of Scots and Scotland is spreading across South Britain. The reports suggest a bout of Scotophobia without parallel since the violently anti-Scottish mood of the English mob in Lord Bute’s day. The ignorance and nastiness of some of this journalism have been startling ...”

“... Most of the institutions around us seem to have infancies – or at least paths of evolution along which they staggered in order to become what they are today. Representative democracy, a civil service, even contemporary war descend to us through strange-looking ancestors: the executioners of kings, the treasurer keeping the royal gold under his bed, the marquis riding with his tenantry into the cannon ...”

“... On the last page​ of his book about his father, Patrick Cockburn writes that Claud ‘disbelieved strongly in the axiom about “telling truth to power”, knowing that the rulers of the earth have no wish to hear any such thing. Much more effective, he believed, is to tell truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions ...”

“... The 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall was merrier than the tenth. In 1999, Berlin was in the middle of a hangover. The European Union was plagued by doubts about its future course; the bloodbath in the former Yugoslavia had unnerved optimists; the Russian economy had collapsed; the sullen misery and unemployment in what had been East Germany seemed to mock the hopes of real unification ...”

“... Written​ constitutions? ‘Because of where I came from, these documents seemed profoundly exotic.’ In spite of where she came from, which was England, Linda Colley became many years ago the first English intellectual to explain to her nation just how exotic ‘Britishness’ was. Now, with the same pioneering enthusiasm, she has produced a book about constitutions ...”

“... Catherine​ would have understood. Like Vladimir Putin, the Empress Catherine II couldn’t rest until her soldiers’ boots had stamped the space between Russia and Western Europe into an obedient lawn. For Putin, so far, the space is Ukraine. For her, Robert Burns’s evil ‘Auld Kate’, it was Poland, though not the compact Polish state of today ...”