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“... as well as in budgeting the NHS. Indeed, political rhetoric wears hardly a fig-leaf in Fitzpatrick and Milligan’s broadside, even though the authors promise us The Truth about the Aids Panic – and we’d better listen because their message carries the weight of medical authority (FitzPatrick is titled ...”

“... the Soviet Union as a foreigner and not become obsessed with spying. (If anyone doubts this, read Michael Frayn’s wonderful novel The Russian Interpreter, published the year I first went to Moscow.) ‘Do you think X is a spy?’ we were always asking each other about new Russian acquaintances, and sometimes about each other. It was a question that went the ...”

“... Purposes. With respect to religious dissent, his main collaborator was the Anglican priest Michael Bordeaux, who in 1970 helped to establish Keston College, whose mission was to publicise religious persecution in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Alongside his own mailing list, Reddaway established a chain system involving well-wishers with their own ...”

“... to the British. The German political classes were beginning to espouse imperialism – as Matthew Fitzpatrick’s monograph establishes, Germany’s expanding empire owed little to its emperors. Kaiser Wilhelm II talked loudly about the need for brutal dealings with the extra-European world, but was too skittish to fashion a Weltpolitik of his own. His most ...”

“... Gide who turned critical of the Soviet Union, bitterly disappointing their hosts, were excoriated.Michael David-Fox’s Showcasing the Great Experiment is the story of Soviet wooing of the Western intelligentsia, focusing on VOKS under Kameneva and Arosev. About a hundred thousand foreigners visited the Soviet Union in the prewar period, many of them ...”

“... that it succeeded at Lenin’s expense, a triumphant negation of Lenin’s success. Back in 1984, Michael Scammell wrote a fine warts-and-all biography of Solzhenitsyn which was forced to end on a note of uncertainty. Had Solzhenitsyn blown his great international success of the 1970s by retreating into angry exile in Vermont to write a multi-volume epic of ...”

“... begun to dominate political debate in Ireland to such as an extent that, as Clarke’s biographer Michael Foy has written, ‘Dublin Castle believed that no secret society was active in Ireland and wanted the police to concentrate instead on open organisations like the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association and Sinn Féin.’ In other words, the ...”

“... books about Haig and Kitchener, VAD nurses, brave dead subalterns and monocled mutineers. I read Michael Hurd’s desolating biography – The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney – on the train to Edinburgh, the city where the nerve-wracked composer, on his way to insanity and death, was hospitalised after being gassed in 1917. I stared at the few surviving pictures of ...”

“... were growing up, the only old framed photograph my brothers and I ever saw was of my grandfather Michael, a hero of the Second World War. And that’s always the way he was described to us, a war hero, the man who tried to save his Glasgow compatriots on HMS Forfar when it was struck by two torpedoes in December 1940. Except that story wasn’t true ...”