“... disappear with progress. Stuck with the obstinate facts of national ambition in the territories it took over, the Soviet leadership produced the famous ‘national in form, socialist in content’ formula which allowed nations to be recognised within the Soviet sphere – and indeed, in many ways promoted – while at the same time their essence was eroded ...”

“... then living and after his two half-brothers had both been killed while serving in it. He at once took the rank of colonel but it’s not clear who or what he commanded, nor what if anything he achieved. By his own self-enhancing account, whose plausibility Todd demolishes item by item by reference to the French and German records, he was a résistant of ...”

“... oddly lively – there was a crowd outside, the lobby was full of men in suits hanging about, it took an age to get registered at the front desk, the bloke getting the attention of both receptionists looked oddly familiar, a bit like Alessandro del … the penny dropped. Juventus were staying at the same hotel, on the night before a home game. There were a ...”

“... thousand people. The disaster, all the preachers said, was God’s punishment for sinfulness. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, saw it as divine vengeance for the cruelties of the Portuguese Inquisition. He had identified a minor earthquake near a racecourse in Yorkshire as another such intervention: God ‘purposely chose such a place, where there ...”

“... Life of Huldrych Zwingli with a couplet: ‘Some talk of Martin Luther and some of Calvin (John)/But Zwingli’s hardly mentioned this side of Zollikon.’ Nevertheless, one can’t deny the truth of it. Potter’s admirable book piled up the evidence that would allow English-speakers to reassess Switzerland’s pioneer Reformer, but, nearly half a ...”

“... On a typical day​ , John Henry Salter would rise to shoot wildfowl at dawn. A GP in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy for 65 years (he died in 1932, aged 91, while still working as the local doctor), he ministered to his patients in the morning, tended his dogs and plants in the afternoon, gave his evenings to committees, and seldom went to bed without completing his diary ...”

“... with Descartes. By contrast, the Recent era started when philosophy, in Richard Rorty’s phrase, took the ‘linguistic turn’. So it started with Frege or Russell, or early Wittgenstein, or the Vienna Circle; take your pick. Modern philosophy was mostly about epistemology: it wanted to understand what makes knowledge possible. Recent philosophy is mostly ...”

“... room and ordered the servants to withdraw ... Spurred on by the frenzy of his lust, he took his daughter’s virginity by force, in spite of her lengthy resistance.’ After the rape, the girl (who remains nameless) wants to kill herself, but her nurse (in romance and fairy tale, nurses almost always advance the immoralist argument for ...”

“... next book, A Palace for a King (1980), written in collaboration with a ‘plain’ historian, John Elliott, studied the court of Philip IV and the building of the Palace of the Buen Retiro on the outskirts of Madrid. Behind the enterprise loomed the massive figure of Philip’s first minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares. Olivares ...”

“... We get a glimpse of Cambridge high life: the gluttony and gambling – swans for the eating, Van John all night, with ‘the Dr’ picking up the tabs. Darwin laughed modestly at the paralysis of his faculties through inertia, but the image of enforced idleness at Christ’s is misleading. There was riding (his horse came up too), but more important he was ...”

“... could not, for the life of me, understand. It wouldn’t be until 1872, when the first volume of John Forster’s biography appeared, that Dickens’s wife and children learned about the pots of boot blacking he’d covered (‘first with a piece of oil paper, and then with a piece of blue paper’) for ten hours a day, six shillings a week, while his father ...”

“... subject-matter. Cubists painted still lifes and a few portraits; even Picasso only occasionally took on the grand themes of war, history and morality.In the tradition that includes Sickert’s ‘room picture’, the focus had shifted from content to style by 1910. It was no longer a case of moral tales for the parlour, erotic pictures for the bedroom and ...”

“... Rubio, another member of the orthodox neoconservative faction who once co-wrote an article with John McCain in the Wall Street Journal claiming that the overthrow of Gaddafi would lead to ‘a democratic and pro-American Libya’. Rubio is preoccupied with schemes to destabilise Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. As late as 2022 he was criticising Trump’s ...”

“... Ministry of Fuel and Power, with Shinwell as his chief. They did not get on, and when Gaitskell took Shinwell’s place after the fuel crisis of 1947, he earned a major enemy for many years to come. But what the diary reveals, more clearly than I have seen elsewhere, is the important part that Gaitskell, though not a full member of the Cabinet, played ...”

“... on his own after climbing an uncharted route by the East Face, without oxygen. The second doubt took no account of ‘summit fever’, or the effects of altitude on people’s judgment. Even before the summit bid, John Noel, the cameraman on the 1924 trip, claimed that Mallory’s obsession with Everest amounted to mental ...”