“... great events he would trace in the next quarter-century include the rise and rapid fall of the Fox-North coalition; the 1784 election, which ushered in the long reign of Pitt the Younger; the madness of George III and the consequent Regency Crisis; the premonition of war and the actual wars with revolutionary France and then with Napoleon. But when you read ...”

“... as a way of allowing honourable men to stay in office without appearing to want to do so. John Nott offered his resignation after the Falklands invasion but he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mrs Thatcher to stay in office. William Whitelaw has written that he wanted to resign as Home Secretary after an intruder had entered the Queen’s bedroom in ...”

“... of English culture, Wiener states that Dickens’s ‘fictional world led from the Old England of John Bull and stage-coaches through the feverish new urban and industrial society to end in a cathedral town among public school men’. This is preceded by a quotation from Angus Wilson on Drood which does not really help the discussion, for the point surely is ...”

“... United States who are wedded to less egalitarian premises. Confident of the obvious fairness of John Rawls’s ‘difference principle’, which states that inequalities are not to be abolished but arranged so that they are of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, philosophers like Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge have sought to apply Rawls’s theory ...”

“... him, was captured along with the Bulgarian Partisans to whom he was attached, near Likatova, north of Sofia, found guilty at a staged trial, and publicly shot on 5 June. His bearing throughout was by all accounts courageous, even blithe. News of the event was slow to reach Britain, but by 1947 Frank’s mother Theodosia and Edward, now demobilised – he ...”

“... with the possible exception of Gabon’s Bongo, the real power behind African oil is European and North American. There is no doubt that African elites have taken full personal advantage of it, but the detail of Shaxson’s book makes clear how keen Western businessmen and officials have been to get their hands on African crude. Shaxson’s defence of what he ...”

“... the politicians against the war, the writers against the war – Edward Pearce in the Guardian, John Diamond in the Mirror, John Pilger wherever anyone prints what he writes – have to be winkled out from the chauvinist mass. How to explain the mood which swept otherwise independent-minded journalists and editors into ...”

“... occasion for a formal portrait. We hear of the florid complexions and the addiction to alcohol of John George of Saxony and Christian IV of Denmark, of the ‘mouse-coloured hair’ and shrill voice of the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria, of the habitual kneeling and hunting of the Emperor Ferdinand II, of the royal bearing of Gustav Adolf of Sweden, and the ...”

“... Smith, provost of the Academy and College of Philadelphia; or again, Ralph Izard, Silas Deane and John Adams, who were in the 1770s and 1780s Franklin’s fellow diplomats in Paris. After 1765, Franklin seems to have hated the entire English nation as well. It was too corrupt to be reformed, he wrote in 1780; and in 1781 he concluded that the English had ...”

“... unspent was left to happen as fearfully as it would.’ In the hands of such writers as Trevor and John McGahern, the short story in Ireland has made an unexpected comeback. Earlier generations – that of Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain and, before them, of George Moore and James Joyce – had established it as the quintessential genre for a society ...”

“... of an institutional view of history. I remember noticing even as a child that the abbeys of North Yorkshire were uncomfortably bare of all living matter, except for the grass around them, which was mowed as smooth as an operating table. Surgical cleanliness appeared to be the prerequisite for historic sites. Nor is the argument yet won. Almost 125 years ...”

“... all of recorded history. Yet a remarkable number of writers persist in trying. To be fair, John Mueller, a leading figure in the war-is-dead school, does not so much ignore the past as twist it to suit his purposes. But in the twisting, The Remnants of War renders history all but unrecognisable. The result is a book that conveys a relentlessly sunny ...”

“... appear effete and irrelevant’. Over the years, a lot of these effete and irrelevant artists – John Updike, Norman Mailer, Jonathan Franzen – have launched tirades against him. The most concise comes from John Irving, commenting red-faced and furious on live TV: ‘Wolfe’s problem is, he can’t bleeping ...”

“... a horse-driven pump, a windmill or a waterwheel. All were tried, but problems persisted until John Smeaton and then Boulton and Watt came up with their steam engines. The company was well served by engineers, who made use of Grinling Gibbons’s Oak Room at the New River Head, and seem to have combined efficiency with longevity: Henry Mill (inventor of a ...”

“... for his next venture, in Ireland. Despite his background, his move there in 1896 was coincidental. John Leslie appealed in the SDF’s paper, Justice, for a socialist organisation to hire Connolly, who was facing destitution, and a job offer came from the Dublin Socialist Club at the modest salary of £1 per week. His time in Ireland would help shape his ...”