“... English; that if they could, they wouldn’t; that a book would be judged by its cover. My copy of Robert Lacey’s monumental work The Kingdom travelled safely inside the dust-jacket of Vincent Cronin’s Louis and Antoinette. Perhaps it was not the wisest choice, since Saudi Arabia has a few things in common with the Ancien Régime: but I was confident that ...”

“... of the Ribbentrop-Molotov hyphen, while it is true that men like Mikhail Suslov and Mao Tse-tung may have gone to their graves thinking of the Leninist state as history exemplified, it is not believable that Edvard Gierek or Milos Jakes or any of the other ‘Vodka-Cola’ general secretaries (Erich Honecker partially exempted) thought anything of the ...”

“... his eight-year-old daughter. His first wife, assuming he had one and she was the same sort of age, may now be a millionaire, she may own a chain of shops or be a top civil servant or the wife of a duke: but her womb, according to Greer, will be the size of an almond and one thing she won’t have is an eight-year-old ...”

“... Whether Napoleon when he landed near Antibes on 1 March 1815 indeed looked rompu historians may have determined: but certainly not with the help of Belloc’s mother, an Englishwoman who was born a little more than fourteen years later. In The Cruise of the Nona, however, Belloc declares that ‘time and again’ in childhood he was told the story of ...”

“... syntax, what is essentially a pictorial style. But Titian’s Dianas, in conjunction with Ovid, may have offered a challenge to Shakespeare in terms of the goddess’s personality. According to Ovid, poor Callisto was betrayed by the very sexual tastes which Diana, ‘a kind of lesbian gym-teacher’, encouraged in her following, for cunning Jupiter had ...”

“... in Britain and America. (Blake’s ‘Tyger’, first known to have existed in October 1793, may have drawn inspiration from the tiger’s ‘eyes darting fire’.) In the following decades, the death of Munro was recounted dozens of times, in volumes of natural history and books of instruction or cautionary tales for children. In A Short Description of ...”

“... which this contrast emerges is one of this collection’s main achievements. Modern Scepticism may in fact be descended from Arcesilaus, Carneades, Aenisedemus and Sextus. But we shall see that the ancients would almost certainly not have recognised it as their legitimate heir. The opponents of ancient Scepticism, the ‘Dogmatists’, were those who ...”

“... were drawn up of such notorious Communists or Communist sympathisers as Brian Walden, David Owen, Robert Mellish, John Stonehouse, Roy Hattersley and Reg Prentice; and even a bogus pamphlet on ‘revolutionary strategy’ for the installation of socialism in Britain was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American journalists, the joint ...”

“... When the chills and fever subside, they leave behind an enveloping fatigue. But the relief may not last long. The symptoms can cycle back again, sometimes returning like clockwork every day, and sometimes every second or third day. If you’re unfortunate, there are also headaches and muscle aches; vomiting and diarrhoea; weight loss; jaundice ...”

“... wanted some say in how the country’s natural resources were exploited, and by whom. Pablo Neruda may have been a dank Stalinist in his politics, and have allowed this to infect his poetry, but he was writing as a patriot when he composed the potent verses entitled ‘They Receive Instructions against Chile’ (translated here by ...”

“... and other platforms were instrumental both in spreading outrage at the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 and in mobilising the vast Black Lives Matter protests that assembled in response that summer. But as Paul Gilroy observed a few months later, ‘I don’t know if the technologies that get people in the streets are so good at keeping them there.’ The ...”

“... of whether one is on the right track is whether most people think the contrary. Comrade Hitchens may still be susceptible to the pull of fraternity when embodied by old buddies from the New Left Review, but his self-ascribed identity now is as a ‘contrarian’. Being ‘independent’ (of parties, institutions, conventional wisdom, codes of politeness) is ...”

“... general assumption was that Prince Albert had provided the definitive and approved working model. Robert Rhodes James has written an entertaining and effective but oddly out-of-kilter book about that model. His standard texts appear to be Justin McCarthy and H.A.L. Fisher, historians whose reputations had faded when Mr James was a schoolboy under Sir Roger ...”

“... now directed against the Communists, whom he held responsible for the division of Korea. In May 1954 Moon finally founded his Unification Church. Moon has always made extreme demands on his followers: they are enjoined to give up everything on becoming members of his flock, and have to work long hours for no pay – engaging in a plethora of activities ...”

“... reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’. Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is ...”