“... Armed Forces were used to being given very clear and specific aims for any military operation. (Northern Ireland was an exception.) Since then, however, the Army in particular has been sent on a number of ‘missions without end’. Currently almost 18,000 troops, deployed in the Falklands, Cyprus, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, as well ...”

“... Kildare. Joseph Dakak was seized by the British at the Syrian border in April 1942 as he travelled home by train from a lemon-buying venture in Palestine, and detained for more than three years in a series of British and French concentration camps on (undeclared) suspicion of being an Axis spy. In both families a tense silence surrounded these ...”

“... state. In those years they flew high over the more typical officers of British Intelligence at home and abroad, whose natural sympathies were right-wing, and who tended to side politically with Hitler and Mussolini rather than with anything which stank of Communism. Surprisingly quickly, after the war, the enemy changed. Suddenly Germany and Italy were ...”

“... that had created America in the first place. Anxious to escape deteriorating conditions at home, the migrants were also attracted by opportunities far away. They wanted to better themselves, to extend their possibilities, and they were willing to uproot themselves in order to do so. Nicholas Lemann’s judicious, well-written study concentrates on the ...”

“... case in which the King’s Secretary issued a warrant authorising two messengers to enter the home of John Entick and search for seditious papers. There was neither common law nor statutory authority for this action, which Entick successfully challenged in the courts, recovering damages from the hapless messengers (said to be ‘as much responsible as ...”

“... was a witty woman and she liked a laugh.’ When Terence O’Neill resigned as prime minister of Northern Ireland in 1969 he admitted that he had failed ‘to break the chains of ancient hatreds’. Ian Paisley was on the rise, stirring up fear and bigotry among the Protestant working classes. The McConville children lived in a Protestant area but went ...”

“... The key judgment is surely that of William Strang, the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, in a paper of May 1943: We need Russian collaboration. The conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty marks our decision that this must be our policy … even if fears that Russia lay a ‘heavy hand’ on eastern, central ...”

“... which bear little relationship to investment and productivity and divide their activities in office between exaggerated reactions against their predecessors’ policies and preparations for the next election, were well described in Michael Stewart’s The Jekyll and Hyde Years. It is striking how often fugitive wets ...”

“... One of Osborne’s first acts on entering the Treasury in May 2010 was to establish an in-house Office of Budget Responsibility, a kind of financial superego that would judge whatever fiscal announcements emanated from Whitehall. When Osborne told the Conservative Party conference in 2012 that ‘We’re all in this ...”

“... as the country they arrived in; the way their experience of Britain evolved as it gradually became home; and the way immigrants felt about their countries of origin if they went back – or if they didn’t. To cover all this, Wills avoids the ploddingly completist and chronological approach of much contemporary British history for something more open-ended ...”

“... to Denmark (‘on his bicycle the Dane is a beautiful creature, but off it he does not feel at home, and looks as awkward as an automaton’); to Paris; to Rapallo. In 1924 he met Pound there, supposedly – the mythopoeic embellishment – at the top of a local hill. ‘Villon’, his first long poem, was written in 1925, and published, with Pound’s ...”

“... My​ first home visit of the day was to a 97-year-old woman who just ‘wasn’t right’. Her daughter had phoned around ten, while I was still doing the morning clinic. Between patients I’d noticed her name pop up on the screen. ‘What do you mean, “not right”?’ I asked Pearl, the receptionist, on my way to call someone from the waiting room ...”

“... Friday, picked her children up from school one day a week, tried to make friends with the stay-at-home mothers who networked in the playground (she always turned up, she says, in tracksuit and trainers, to show she was ‘focused’ on the children), and tried not to cancel outings. One half-term she’d promised to take her son and his friend to the cinema ...”

“... conspiracists and militiamen, according to Walter, that the next American civil war will come, as home-grown bands of right-wing terrorists and xenophobic guerrillas infest the democratic liberal order of the United States. This scenario doesn’t allow space for an alternative fracture in society’s representation of reality, one that is possibly more ...”

“... Little England deafness and blindness to the outside world. May stowed Boris away in the Foreign Office as if it were a scullery cupboard: nothing in there mattered to her. She and the other Tory leaders simply didn’t notice that Amber Rudd’s plan to name and shame British firms that didn’t list their foreign ...”