“... articles for German publications, which helped him gain entry to German rightwing circles. He may have met Hitler in Berlin at the time of the brief Kapp Putsch in March 1920. But the evidence is tainted because a report by Hitler on his visit to Berlin at that time – one used by German historians – could be a forgery by the same man who perpetrated ...”

“... destitution, or its schizoid sexual morality, or just the improving works of Samuel Smiles? We may never know, but there is more than a suspicion that the distinctly unpolymathic chemist/lawyer/housewife was just embroidering on a few simplistic items of Grantham family folklore. No matter that the nation relearns morality from such dubious sources. Other ...”

“... National Guard, run at the time by that friend of America, Colonel Noriega. The Shah’s friends may have proved generally faithless, but he had shown himself to be more than equally perfidious. Having attempted to appease the anger of the Qom mullahs by imprisoning his urbane Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda, the Shah flew out of Tehran without bothering ...”

“... which Alexander exercised over his. It is a bizarre quartet, over the choice of which eyebrows may be raised. Where are the traditional Great Captains – Julius Caesar, Tamerlane, Gustavus Adolphus, Marlborough, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Moltke, even Montgomery or MacArthur? There seems something almost perverse in Keegan’s deliberate avoidance of ...”

“... we want that too. In his most effective verses, though, Nature is mostly seen as hostile. It may be good for us but it wants nothing from us in return, beyond our trembling capitulation. Caught in Nature’s war-zones, even the most elemental humans – even the poet Hughes himself – come across as wimpishly inept, riddled with feebleness and ...”

“... through the vents in his writing room. Getting on to midnight. Feels a little better; new writing may be at hand. Assumes that Islas Malvinas is Spanish. Assumes that these islands were called Malvinas originally, before they became known as the Falklands. But the encyclopedias correct him: it seems that the British, like God, were originally everywhere, and ...”

“... an armoured scythe towards Singapore.’ The blurb-writer has got his campaign wrong. That was May 1940, in France and Belgium, when the opponents were German. The Japanese forces landed in Malaya were considerably smaller than the Allied armies facing them, but under the redoubtable General Yamashita (hanged in 1948 for war crimes), they knew what to do ...”

“... because they always agree, especially in disagreeing with almost everything their children may do or want to do. They are ‘enemies of abandon’, and regard even the convent school to which they reluctantly send their daughters as a sink of modernity. Uma adores school, though she is a dismal failure there, being plain, shortsighted, clumsy, and not ...”

“... restauranteur’, Jakle and Sculle assert, has become ‘the creator of place’. This may always have been so, but with the fracturing of the institutions of family and neighbourhood, and the growth of urban sprawl, the restaurant is now one of the few spaces left that can provide a ‘sense of place’: As social beings we are a function of the ...”

“... in the 1870s inspired Tennyson’s poem ‘Montenegro’, which was published in May 1877, on the front page of the Nineteenth Century, accompanied by a long essay on Montenegrin history by Gladstone, who had encouraged Tennyson in the role of ‘Montenegro’s Byron’. Earlier that month, in a speech in the Commons lasting two and a half ...”

“... or trade. This is World History in which most of the world plays the role of victim. Some readers may feel that I am expressing what is sometimes considered the professional deformation of the Africanist – a refusal to face facts. If historical work on epidemics focuses on Euro-America’s domination of the world and on its achievements in ...”

“... noted that where ‘a positive self-image is not portrayed for a particular group, that group may develop a sense of inadequacy about itself, reinforced by how other groups project their media stereotypes on them’ – and he isn’t talking about anything more sinister than the Beverly Hillbillies. Or, in the words of the narrator of Tomato Red ...”

“... in 1967 partly to the tobacco issue, which is nonsense. I suspect, from these errors, that he may overstate his case on the political impact of tobacco, and some of the chapter on Ronald Reagan is clearly guilty of that. But this is a very good book indeed, and everyone interested in the way power works in capitalist (not pluralist) society should read ...”

“... I would say it is inevitable that something is going to snap. Quite what it will be – and it may not have escaped notice that the two scenarios I have not dismissed are two and five – I cannot judge. And it is perhaps unfair to look to Messrs Butler and Kavanagh for clairvoyance. Their book claims to be nothing other than the picture of a political ...”

“... one of her brothers was the original of Charley’s Aunt. After Wilde’s disgrace and death she may have lost heart a little. But just as she had stood by her ruined friend, so she put a brave face on her marriage until Ernest, on the verge of bankruptcy, was sent away to Canada in the company of his illegitimate daughter, at the diamond merchant’s ...”