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“... With war in Europe an immediate prospect in July 1914, the young First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, felt a tinge of guilt at his growing excitement and ‘hideous fascination’ with the detailed preparation. He caught the mood of the moment. ‘No one can measure the consequences,’ he recorded; ‘we all drift on in a kind of dull cataleptic trance ...”

“... In 1977 E.H. Carr completed his 14-volume History of Soviet Russia. He had embarked on an intellectual day excursion but found himself on a major expedition through a dark continent of knowledge. He had originally intended – as far back as 1944 – to spend no more than three years in the field. It turned out to be thirty-three. After such an achievement, after such exertions, any ordinary human being might have felt that enough was enough, and faded into a well-deserved retirement, tending roses at home in Barton, pottering about Great Court, Trinity College, Cambridge, a living legend spied by earnest young undergraduates ...”

“... his astringent dissection of self-serving internationalist hypocrisy is more valuable than ever. Jonathan Haslam’s perceptive and intelligent biography shows how much Carr’s thinking was shaped by the age into which he was born, even if he seemed on the surface to have broken utterly with his origins. ‘For all the dramatic changes that were to ...”

“... of a Nazi-dominated Europe, but not one, as he shows, that can be dismissed as fantasy. Jonathan Haslam, arguing about whether the Cold War was inevitable, writes as a self-confessed sceptic about the value of such questions. ‘One dubious instance,’ he suggests, ‘is where the historian arbitrarily selects a single favourite ...”

“... in relation to another singer, Bryan Ferry, or the actress Minnie Driver, or the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby. How exactly did Epstein come to have ten numbers for Peter Mandelson? We are all, to some extent, defined by the company we keep, and if there are things we don’t notice about our ‘friends’, it is often because we realised it was better ...”