“... Ayatollah Khomeini. As late as 1974, when I first visited Iran, not merely the Court and officer class but a great number of townspeople were openly impatient with religion. Islam in its Iranian version, known as Shi‘a Islam, reeked to them of feudalism, passivity, poverty, the past, the previous dynasty, the bazaar and the provinces and what the Shah in a ...”

“... own – if only because ‘in’ the family was hardly a figure of speech. Until the First World War, the event almost invariably took place at home. And until the later decades of the century, Jalland argues, it typically took place in a climate of religious belief that made all the difference not only to the dying but to those left behind.Thanks to the ...”

“... added . . . geometry and trigonometry, chemistry, rhetoric, evidences of Christianity, and a class in the US Constitution. Electives included piano, guitar, drawing and painting. As if that weren’t enough to handle, college life presented a set of unique social challenges. Peril quotes from student handbooks and etiquette guides, whose tone of cheery ...”

“... might have shaken his head, on the other hand, and regretted that those who were young and hated war should have to die ‘when cruel old campaigners win safe through’. Epitaphs apart, what will survive of Graham Greene? Not love, certainly; nor the famously tortured guerrilla of Roman Catholicism, fighting and writing for and against the Church from ...”

“... spreading it or for failing to be treated: but the English system of VD clinics set up after World War One was, unlike the Scandinavian, purely voluntary. Thus, Mort argues, despite the plethora of repressive or reforming discourses, what is remarkable is not how much, but how little, the state has chosen to enforce sexual morality through medical means. Why ...”

“... the Cuban missile crisis. Suddenly two newsworthy people were involved in making the decision for war or peace (‘an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation’). And within less than a week it was all over, and the squall of fear which had rushed over the horizon had safely passed. The gas masks were put away and the digging of trenches stopped. A good civilian ...”

“... boat the voyagers continue to observe the customs of their classes, the seamen forward, the middle-class emigrants amidships, the petty officers in their messes, the officers in their wardroom, and the captain on his quarterdeck. The professionals are desperate for action, partly as the quickest way to preferment; the bourgeoisie is not. The young gentleman is ...”

“... the latter category although the credentials are the same: you have to be loathed by a particular class, group, religion or nation, and you have to represent a cause which your opponents do not acknowledge. In the Middle East, for example, Moammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini himself have been demonised. Gaddafi (Arab unity, Arab freedom ...”

“... avert mass deaths. The final episode of British colonial starvation, again in Bengal, during World War Two, killed three million people and hastened the end of the empire. Faced with the Japanese occupation of Burma, the British Army took control of food supplies and confiscated fishing boats – fearing that they would be seized for a seaborne invasion ...”

“... into the bush. (The Zimbabwean handshake: hands, thumbs, then hands again.) What did you do in the war, Daddy? Tell us, what was it like? It seems so long ago. Zimbabwe has just celebrated the third anniversary of its independence. Comrade Robert Mugabe rules. Ministers have been fired, reinstated, shuffled sideways. The British have made an integrated ...”

“... what they perhaps did not: that there is a way to reverse the catastrophic effects of even this class of nerve agents, effects which – because they cause a loss of muscle function – can include uncontrollable vomiting, diarrhoea, convulsions, paralysis, respiratory failure and cardiac arrest. At Salisbury District Hospital, the Skripals would have been ...”

“... She never married, looked after her parents and, when they died, lived on alone. Except for the war years when she worked in the telephone exchange and for a mobile library, she never had an office job, and during the last period of her life has had pretty well no income besides the state pension. In view of this simplicity it is puzzling to me how complex ...”

“... were still battling white minority rule, and the struggle was becoming more intense as the Cold War drew on. The Soviet Union and the US both had a role in the making and unmaking of Africa’s independence movements, from the relative success of decolonisation in Ghana through the disaster of the Belgian Congo to the costly ...”

“... the Third Programme. It probably couldn’t have happened at any time except when it did. The war seemed to have shown that the public for music and books and culture generally had been thrillingly enlarged. The Forces had developed a keen appetite for education, cultural and civic, some of it pretty subversive, for the service vote is known to have had a ...”

“... immediate aftermath of the failure in Vietnam. For a few years it seemed that the US leadership class might be willing to re-examine the dangers of Cold War dogma and overextended imperial reach. The New York Times had published the Pentagon Papers, revealing the systematic mendacity behind the Vietnam ...”