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“... to slavery in colonial America, seeking to explain the system’s origins. The new books by Ira Berlin and Robin Blackburn are outstanding contributions to this literature. Berlin, who has already written a study of free blacks in the 19th-century South, for many years directed the Freedmen and Southern Society ...”

“... in slaves developed within the United States. This ‘internal middle passage’, as the historian Ira Berlin has called it, involved the sale of more than two million slaves in the decades before the Civil War, a large number of whom were sent from older states such as Virginia to the burgeoning Cotton Kingdom of the Lower South. Every Southern newspaper ...”

“... printed invitation from Francis Stuart to a party in Dublin commemorating a party he had given in Berlin on St Patrick’s Day 1941. I wondered, when I read it, why Francis had sent this. Over the years he had invited me to several events, but he had never had invitations printed. I wondered if it was clear to him, as it was to me, that the invitation was a ...”

“... the squaddy replies. A few of the Unionists I spoke to sounded this note of triumph at the IRA ceasefire but not many. Most were either sniffing secret deals or talking about waiting and seeing. ‘Peace in our lunchtime,’ one woman laughed. I thought I would leave it a few minutes before approaching the shop directly. A leather-jacketed stranger ...”

“... War Two. Jim O’Neill was arrested in 1940, when Eamon de Valera’s Government, fearful that IRA activities might compromise Eire’s neutrality, rounded up all known IRA men. He was held for four years at the Curragh internment camp in County Kildare. Joseph Dakak was seized by the British at the Syrian border in ...”

“... after an afternoon amble through a supportive House of Lords. It was the Irish in general, and the IRA in particular, who provided the explanation for this contrived panic, which could not be justified even from statistics available at the time. (The worst IRA atrocity of this period, the killing of five people in ...”

“... That will be news to the people of Northern Ireland, who will be keen to know whether the IRA are totalitarian Communists or radical Muslims. According to Mr Netanyahu, terrorism does not stem from social misery and frustration. There are no ‘root causes’ of terrorism other than ‘the political ambitions and designs of expansionist states and the ...”

“... Some weeks ago Sir Isaiah Berlin gave a broadcast in which he described his first visit to the legendary Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in Moscow in 1945 – a visit cut short in its prime by the bellowing of Randolph Churchill in the courtyard outside, hotly pursued by the Russian Secret Police. Alas, such humorous anecdotes will not be found by Berlin devotees in his latest book, Washington Despatches ...”

“... and Shall We Dance and George Stevens for Swing Time); and there are the differences among Irving Berlin (Top Hat), Jerome Kern (Swing Time) and George Gershwin (Shall We Dance) as composers. There is some amazing dialogue (in this case by Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano – Allan Scott is credited on all three movies): ‘What are the grounds for divorce in ...”

“... pro-German sentiment, it is true, but it was never more than marginal. It could be found among the IRA, who still believed that England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity. It was sometimes based on a mistaken class analysis of the conflict: in the words of one of Mr Fisk’s informants, ‘the Establishment people around here [Co. Kerry] did not want ...”

“... and disappear before one’s eyes with an almost sinister facility.’As late as 1926, Irving Berlin, the songwriter Porter most admired and the only other master of the Broadway musical besides himself to write both words and music, counselled the frustrated Porter to return to New York where the city and the audience were much changed since he’d ...”

“... flushed fruit turns out to be a painting of part of a painting produced 20 years before (now in Berlin): an ominous, doom-laden vision of familiar things, done in the great thunder and lightning impasto of Cézanne’s first (I hate ‘early’) style. The Moscow Smoker’s elbow goes off at a neat tangent into a long vertical borrowed from the edge of a ...”

“... fixing onto a sequel. The book begins: ‘On a clear, blueblack, starry night, in the city of Berlin, in the year 2003, two young people sat down to dinner. Their names were Sophie and Patrick.’ These two, it turns out, are merely the offspring of two of the novel’s main characters, whose stories Sophie proceeds to tell: ‘Come with ...”

“... for the victims of Allied bombings at the Hôtel de Ville. War fever apart (the shouts of ‘To Berlin!’ in 1914), the great moments of unanimity have taken place at public funerals – like those of Victor Hugo, Pierre Overney, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Edith Piaf. Sunday’s demonstration is of the same order, the crowd is moved by sentiment and satisfied by ...”

“... Beaverbrook instructed his newspapers to monitor the anonymous propaganda programmes coming out of Berlin, and the Express radio critic, who wrote under the name Jonah Barrington, began to invent nicknames for the various broadcasters: ‘Auntie Gush’, ‘Ursula the Pooh’, ‘Uncle Smarmy’. It amounted to an unofficial attempt to kill propaganda by ...”