“... Empire. The second is about the clash, which began in India but ended in Egypt, between the two major imperial powers of the 18th century, Britain and France. In the period from the mid-18th century, when Jasanoff’s story begins, until 1858, when the Crown dissolved the East India Company to create the Indian Empire, the fledgling ‘British Empire’ in ...”

“... of admission’ was pretty much Coward’s verdict on the playwrights who emerged in the wake of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (Wesker included), and largely their verdict on him. And despite a revival of interest in his early work during the Sixties (‘Dad’s renaissance’, he called it), Coward has been regarded since 1956 as being on the losing ...”

“... diplomatic ‘system’ – Germany was directly or indirectly linked by treaties with every major European power except France. Only from close up can we see how perilous and uncertain many of the steps he took appeared at the time. As Jonathan Steinberg shows in this superb biography, there was nothing preordained about Bismarck’s successes. Had the ...”

“... from the inbuilt contradictions of the newly established Protestant Church of England. His first major job came in one of the surviving cathedrals. Francis Mallett, then dean of Lincoln, had once been Archbishop Cranmer’s chaplain, but after Protestant waverings became one of Queen Mary’s most stridently Catholic chaplains: his continued tenure at ...”

“... hadn’t reported the home visit. James explained that he had no idea whom he should inform. The major took the point, and asked some questions about James’s Party membership. Finally he inquired: ‘Are you for Stalin or for us?’ James truthfully answered: ‘For us, sir.’ ‘Shake on it, old man’ was the reply. ‘For the rest of the war, no ...”

“... of sectarian conflict, for, as the acerbic historian Joe Lee lamented, Ulster has a ‘dearth of major atheist settlements’. Geography also presents challenges on a larger scale. The incomer from ‘GB’, as Ulster folk call Great Britain, quickly learns not to call the nearby larger island ‘the mainland’, while apparent synonyms for Northern Ireland ...”

“... by Bill Clinton, and stayed on through 9/11 up until 2005, when he became the principal deputy to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. In 2006, George W. Bush appointed him director of the CIA, where he stayed until 2009, when Barack Obama replaced him with Leon Panetta. During Hayden’s ten years at the top, the intelligence ...”

“... and with serious disturbances likely in the future, the internal security portfolio is a major prize for a future presidential aspirant. Politics in Kenya are micro-local in focus. Political leaders are judged on what they deliver to their communities. Those aspiring to office appeal for support by spelling out what they can do for their constituents ...”

“... again. The psychological semitones tend, however, to be drowned out by the crashing chords of the major theme. It was Lehmann’s impetus as a writer and her misfortune as a woman to be incurably in love with romance. Judith allows Roddy to make love to her and afterwards writes to him, pouring out her happiness and looking forward to their shared future. He ...”

“... Congress barely peeped as costs soared – though there were a few notable holdouts, like Senator John McCain, who called it ‘a scandal and a tragedy’. McCain is a leading representative of a dissident American military tradition that prefers light and agile to massive and lumbering, but it may not be insignificant that his home state, Arizona, is one of ...”

“... not too long before. But who was he? And was he Roman, or British, or something in between?The major candidate is Lucius Artorius Castus. His career is recorded on two inscriptions found in Croatia, which Higham carefully edits, translates and comments on. He seems to have been an interesting man, a career soldier who served as centurion in four Roman ...”

“... tongue that lacks numerals (even ‘one’) and cannot or will not formulate such recursions as John’s brother’s house (allegedly, too, it lacks sentence-embedding, although it often achieves the same results through verbal suffixes), and Riau Indonesian, in which the lack of grammatical markers and the flexibility of word order reportedly allow both ...”

“... detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ Actually, as John Durham Peters points out in Courting the Abyss, there is no evidence that Voltaire ever said any such thing. An English writer, Beatrice Hall, writing under a male pseudonym in 1906, suggested that Voltaire’s attitude to the burning of a book written by ...”

“... First, let me declare a disinterest. John Lanchester and I are both involved, in different ways, with the London Review of Books, but otherwise have nothing to do with one another. Now that’s out of the way, onto the novels. Lanchester’s first, The Debt to Pleasure (1996), begins: ‘This is not a conventional cookbook’ – a more interesting way of saying that it is an unconventional novel ...”

“... from the Stalin Peace Prize which he had won the year before was icing on a substantial cake. John Butler is a Canterbury man and an emeritus professor at the University of Kent, best known for his book The Quest for Becket’s Bones. The dean now and then compared his own struggles for truth with those of St Thomas, though the dean’s bones and indeed ...”