“... wars of the 19th century it had provided the country with its only effective government. It may not, in fact, be quite so old as the liberal general Gutierrez Mellado and David Gilmour seem to think – like most European armies it is, in its present form, principally a creation of the late 18th century – but its sense of being the defender, not only ...”

“... about the next battle, of how they will be better organised, of how tactics can be improved. It may sound like bravado, but you believe them when they say they were prepared to stay out another year. Just as countries at war adapt their economies to special production and consumption needs, Grimethorpe developed a successful strike economy. The black-market ...”

“... version is a version of John’s version, and what, in the last analysis, Updike’s upshot may be deemed to be. Updike has recently pointed out that his novel is a version of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, rewritten, as it were, from the husband’s point of view. However, I have no doubt that, at a deeper level, Roger’s Version is an instalment ...”

“... the Whitlam doctrine that the interests of reformers and conservatives are irreconcilable. Hawke may be wrong and Whitlam right; but what is certain is that Hawke regards the memory of the Whitlam years as an electoral liability for Labor. Whitlam does not discuss the part played by himself in his own downfall. He admits his relative indifference to economic ...”

“... in the German-run town of the same name (now transliterated as Qingdao). In Qingdao itself, you may come across the imposing Romanesque-revival edifice of St Michael’s Cathedral, which looks as if it belongs in a city somewhere in north Germany a century or so ago, as, in a sense, it does. All in all, it’s not much compared to the extensive ...”

“... in the palace, so terrified was he in the confusion that followed the murder. Caligula’s reign may not have started too badly. There was perhaps one of those brief honeymoon periods which regularly accompanied a change of ruler in ancient Rome. In Caligula: A Biography, Winterling points to a range of conciliatory measures in the early ...”

“... not (apparently) debilitating. The novel, for one: it can make gentility its subject. The subject may strike one, the more one rereads, as a minor and exhaustible one, if put alongside the accounts of being-in-the-social-world available to the Irish, say, or the Russians or Americans. I used to laugh in California at the way American students of modern ...”

“... to take the interest in the ‘little man’ that became the hallmark of his writing. ‘The war may have brought misery to many,’ Fallada wrote to his therapist Dr Artur Tecklenburg in 1915, ‘but it did only good to me, because during peacetime no one would have considered me for such responsibilities.’ For all his new-found faith in other ...”

“... pointed remarks about ‘seclusion’ being ‘one of the few luxuries which Royal personages may not indulge’ coincided with a new boom in republican clubs, which sprang up from Plymouth to Aberdeen. For the rest of the decade most of Albert’s work in shoring up the monarchy was undone by the woman who claimed to have appreciated it most. As ...”

“... died in 1937). After returning from the Far East, Suret started a course at the Sorbonne, but in May 1940, as the Germans advanced on Paris, he and his student communist friends got on their bikes and went off to the west of France. Back in Paris later that year, Suret was arrested by the Vichy police for posting flyers. Handed over to the Germans, he saw ...”

“... try to get out of the water at this time. If this is not possible, repeat bangs to the snout may offer temporary restraint, but the result will likely become increasingly less effective. If a shark actually bites, we suggest clawing at its eyes and gills, two sensitive areas. One should not act passively if under attack – sharks respect size and ...”

“... body travelled back to Edinburgh accompanied by his wife.) The court granted its first divorce in May 1858. Henry’s case was heard a month later. In September the judges delivered their verdict: Isabella was not guilty and Henry, enraged, didn’t get his divorce. The argument that the diary was not to be trusted, which had been used all along to exonerate ...”

“... To be right when everybody else has been wrong can be a lonely, even disabling experience. This may be a way of understanding the enigmatic character of Joachim Fest, the German historian, journalist and editor who died six years ago. His Berlin family belonged to the Bildungsbürgertum – roughly, the well-educated middle class – and rejected Hitler and National Socialism from the very first moment ...”

“... relying on him to help steer Germany through the negotiations. When Wirth became chancellor in May 1921, he appointed Rathenau minister of reconstruction, and the next month, speaking in the Reichstag, Rathenau formally announced the government’s intention to ‘fulfil’ the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, including the payment of reparations in both ...”

“... to persuade oneself that these might be a large clue to his work’s private meaning. (‘New life may take old patterns,’ he writes in The Hills of Adonis of the impersonal afterlives suggested by ancient religions, ‘but never again does it reproduce the mind, the look, the cadence of a voice, as it once had been. And we, who love the ...”