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“... in Comyns’s work, as do children who are neglected, abused, endowed with supernatural powers, disruptive, imaginative and periodically violent. ‘See stars, Mummy,’ Sandro says before hitting Sophia over the head with an iron bar. It is this intertwining of fact and fiction, realism and surrealism, that gives Comyns’s work its power. Six of ...”

“... modest without ceasing to be aware, as they developed from a slowish start, of his unusual powers. He was proud of his distinguished theatrical forebears (‘born into the purple of the Terry family’, as he put it) and at one time thought of changing his name to Terry. He accepted the charge that he moved badly; he was no athlete, hated having to get ...”

“... book in rejoinder. It is going to be a long time before a better book of its kind appears than Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The elegance of its style, the easy and effective deployment of historical scholarship, and, above all, the ability to distinguish the central threads of recent debate from the side-issues and to follow ...”

“... For the nationalism of the developing countries is increasingly directed not against the colonial powers of the imperial age, but against other countries and ethnic groups within the Third World itself. This is evident in the growing oppression of minorities in Third World countries, and in the growing number of wars between Third World states, of which that ...”

“... lilac-coloured pyjama-style trousers and a blue smock. After GB left, I said he looked like Austin Powers. He said you are the second person today who’s said that.’ The next day: ‘Up to see TB in the flat. Another Austin Powers moment. Yellow/green underpants and that was it. I said what a prat he looked. He said I was ...”

“... a Western consensus developed that the intervention was something best forgotten. Indeed, both Richard Nixon in 1972 and Margaret Thatcher twelve years later succeeded so well in this that they were able to assure Soviet interlocutors that their countries had never been at war with each other.There was plenty of reason to see the intervention as nasty ...”

“... and Prussia, which might have given a lead, had fallen under the influence of the other Eastern powers. Restoration France was too much at odds with itself to offer any positive initiatives. England was the one great hope: England the builder of coalitions for war might be the benign inspiration for European reconstruction in peace. Unfortunately, English ...”

“... industrial squalor and urban overcrowding persists in the minds of public and planners alike,’ Richard Rogers and Anne Power argue in Cities for a Small Country, ‘and fuels an almost obsessive desire for low-density, suburban homes.’ What happened, they ask, to ‘the English love of cities’? Should we blame the town planner Ebenezer Howard for the ...”

“... own Plantagenet relations. She is the daughter of a duke and the niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III. On her wrist, emblematic, is a small barrel. Her father was Shakespeare’s ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’, who died in the Tower of London at the age of 29, attainted for treason and supposedly drowned in a butt of malmsey. The ...”

“... More drew on Sallust and Tacitus to compose his study of tyranny in The History of King Richard III. Shakespeare, inspired by More’s history, departed from it in loyally contrasting Richard with his virtuous Tudor successors. More’s praise of the first two Tudors could hardly have been more perfunctory. To ...”

“... types of Englishmen and competing political tendencies; between little Englanders (such as Richard Cobden and John Bright) on the one hand and chauvinist imperialists (such as Lord Palmerston and Joseph Chamberlain) on the other; between a maritime and peaceful trading nation and a military-imperial superpower; between a petit-bourgeois ...”

“... he composed a memorandum at the Congress of Troppau demanding armed intervention by the assembled powers to crush revolutions in Spain and Italy. A year later, Austria implemented the recipe in Italy. But even while the Congress of Laibach (1821), which authorised the dispatch of troops, was still in progress, insurrection broke out in Greece. For Metternich ...”

“... honing his diplomatic skills in the last decades of Edward III, surviving the tumultuous reign of Richard II (1377-99), and gaining the favour of Henry IV before what must have been a rather sudden death in 1400. To contextualise his career, Turner provides an extensive political, social, economic and cultural history of England over the second half of the ...”

“... He would see the United States, uninhibited as she apparently was in 1956 by the separation of powers and the prerogatives of Congress, move with sureness and speed to confront a dictator in the Middle East. He would think that, as he had always predicted, the United States, when faced, to use his words, with ‘what is in fact an act of force which, if it ...”

“... it drew on still earlier work in social science (Sorokin, Andreski and Janowitz), social policy (Richard Titmuss’s rather naive equation of ‘the Dunkirk spirit’ with social reform, for example, is now very familiar) and Medieval studies. In the early Sixties at Edinburgh University, I launched special subjects on ‘The War and the Welfare State in ...”