“... thereby inviting a German attack. Girvin suggests that the bombing of Dublin by the Luftwaffe in May 1941, which saw 34 civilian deaths in the North Strand area and the destruction of hundreds of houses, was a warning of the price to be paid for giving up neutrality. Second, de Valera feared a pre-emptive British invasion would be justified by Britain’s ...”

“... At another point, Campbell notes that ‘he had clearly been chatting to his maker again.’ That may be the key to Blair’s metamorphosis from a politician who prided himself on his sensitivity to public opinion, to one who prided himself on his ability to ignore it. The full extent of the disaster in Iraq is not present in these pages, but it looms over ...”

“... Such is the familiar story and Clive Ponting tells it with verve and clarity. The Crimean War may lack the exuberance and wit of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why (1954), but instead it puts the war in its geopolitical context, reminding us not only that this was the largest and costliest conflict between 1815 and 1914 (the casualties slightly higher ...”

“... regarded embassies and their staff as little more than family retainers, an attitude which, again, may not seem so surprising when you remember that Mrs Thatcher greeted the news of the arrival of Mark’s first child with ‘We are a grandmother.’ Everything about Mark is so rebarbative that it seems only natural that he would count Jonathan Aitken and ...”

“... the Rivonia days. We can all feel proud of Mandela and Sisulu, of Fischer and, yes, of Joffe. He may be Lord Joffe these days but he played his part. What none of us can feel happy about is that Mandela invited Percy Yutar to his presidential inauguration and later went out of his way to visit him and shake his hand. Mandela explained such gestures by the ...”

“... free lee-gal ad-vice-ah’. Who is the joke on here? Who cares? Sit back and enjoy the ride. It may be that the reason all this works is that Dylan is Dylan, and simply hearing him do something as mundane as spinning a few records and reading out a couple of emails exerts its own magnetic pull. But radio can make the most interesting people sound boring if ...”

“... degree exploiting her youth and unmarried status to ask naive questions and elicit richer answers may have made her particularly sensitive to the way her woman informants had used ‘ignorance’ to their own advantage. If Beier, in the end, tells us a familiar story – mothers had power, and they lost it – Fisher gives us something more complex and ...”

“... to upgrade bases, roads and telecommunications. After Osama left Saudi Arabia for the last time in May 1991, he followed the well-worn path of the ‘semi-independent bin Laden brothers’ by starting ventures of his own in and around Khartoum: the bin Laden organisation won the contract to build a new Saudi-funded airport in Sudan. King Fahd ordered Bakr to ...”

“... no one does. Yet few can afford a photovoltaic cell of their own, and that’s a pity. Conditions may be ripe for a renaissance of environmental technology, but it won’t be possible to order it from a catalogue. Barack Obama, caught on tape during a debate-prep session last year, identified the need for a collective solution: ‘We can’t solve global ...”

“... thought that Britain was the last country that should be pillorying Mugabe, however awful he may be, in view of its past relations with his country); and if Africans could come to regard ‘transparency, honesty and accountability’ as just as much African values – they will certainly have some African precedents – as ‘Western’ ones. You can’t ...”

“... in them. Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’ To get a glimpse of the reality beneath this deception, call to mind the events of July 2008, when the Italian government proclaimed a state ...”

“... in the 14th century: ‘The truth … is that no such people do exist as nations, though there may be an individual monster here and there.’ For Hobbes the cannibal was a very useful part of his thought experiment. The war of all against all would be at its most virulent where pre-social individuals ate each other when they met. And they ...”

“... fewer skulls than skeletons. The Anglo-Saxons had a word, heafod-stocc (‘head-stake’), that may explain the discrepancy: it is likely that three heads were put up on stakes along the ridge-line. Study of isotopes in the teeth indicated that most of the dead were Scandinavians, and that they were all male and mostly young. They had the well-developed ...”

“... 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 the few where Lockheed has recently shed jobs rather than piled them on. (What Arizona has instead of multiple Lockheed facilities is the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group at ...”

“... if I drink one in Australia? But actually, I realise, I won’t be there. The Russian public may be indifferent to the centenary of their Revolution, but international scholars are off on the academic pilgrimage trail, giving the Revolution a ‘deep, objective, professional evaluation’ at conferences from Sundsvall to Santiago. The title of my as yet ...”