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“... 1915. In that era of large families, he was one of five of my close forebears who fought in France during the First World War. Three wrote letters and reflections about the trench experience, of which I have originals or copies. They offer a corrective, for me a significant one, to a popular myth about the Western Front, sustained by several bestselling ...”

“... feel – as did many writers in the 18th century – that, until the arrival of the fully-formed David, their achievements failed, with only rare exceptions, to match up to the expectations aroused by the prestige with which they were surrounded. The reasons for this failure in a society so extraordinarily rich in artistic talent should be a matter of ...”

“... of Africa or opposed the Suez invasion in a famous editorial that described Britain and France as gangsters. What I remember were the things that made us laugh: the column by Paul Jennings that had a tongue-twister about ‘tuskless rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays ...”

“... steps like effigies to some exhausted god of creation.’ Into this quiet world rides a knight. David Knight is a handsome lieutenant with hair in ‘Cellinian frescoes and fashionable porticoes over his dented brow’. He carves their names into a tree. ‘David, ...”

“... flagging and her health failing, she fled the country in August 1815, and went into exile in France. Ill, impoverished and friendless, she was dead within less than a year. The Duke of Clarence seems not to have mentioned this to anybody, and in July 1818, he married Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. The details of Mrs Jordan’s life have been well known for ...”

“... have cast a glance at Maurice Agulhon’s work on republican imagery and symbolism in 19th-century France, and speculated as to why the French put up statues to principles and ideals, while the English commemorate princes and idols. All in all, this is a well-meaning but slightly claustrophobic book: rather like Albert himself. ‘A town hall,’ Sir Charles ...”

“... The former wanted the money to make himself king of Castile, the latter to lead expeditions to France (the one he did lead in 1380 was an expensive fiasco). This resentment was the cause of the murder of Sudbury, a former chancellor, and Hales, the king’s treasurer, in London; in the country the targets were often the poll tax commissioners and the ...”

“... Wellington (her pen as mighty as his sword); Gash’s Peel (a peerless study of a baronet); Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne (one patrician beguilingly evoking another); Blake’s Disraeli (champagne and epigrams all the way); and Marquand’s MacDonald (Fame is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers have fared less well: Chatham and Lord John ...”

“... sooner and on a larger scale in some areas than others: it reached its furthest extent in France, England and some German and Hungarian-speaking regions of Europe. It was slowest in Russia and Russian Poland – though even there it had advanced substantially by the First World War. To write the history of the Jews in modern Europe is, therefore, like ...”

“... director of operations was Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys. Its legal draftsman was Sir David Maxwell Fyfe QC, a right-wing libertarian with potent credentials as a principal prosecutor at Nuremberg. It was Maxwell Fyfe who told a Conservative Party rally in 1948 that just as Nazism had crept first gradually and then irresistibly into German ...”

“... superpower of the 16th century, standing in the way of Habsburg domination of the continent, was France. Conflict between the Habsburgs and the Valois French flared intermittently. There were two main flashpoints: the perpetually war-torn Italian peninsula, and North-West Europe. Over the years, the struggle between England, ...”

“... work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that ‘it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abscess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century.’ It is, perhaps, a curious notion that there could be any time when it ...”

“... nations at face value. Of course, historians of England have examined the Plantagenet empire in France and the global empire acquired in the 18th and 19th centuries, but they have rarely considered the implications of such extended territorial acquisitions for England itself. Only recently has the geographical question of England come more clearly into ...”

“... a flourish: ‘Among the many groups of people who suffered at the hands of the Ancien Régime in France – the insane, the poor, sodomites, alchemists and blasphemers – the impotent have long been forgotten.’ With these words, Darmon carefully places himself in the tradition of the late Michel Foucault, his history of madness as well as his more ...”

“... of Cold War politics and the nuclear threat. They played themselves out very differently in France, Italy, Germany and the US, and differently again in the Soviet Union as compared to the East European satellites (not to speak of the Third World, which figures peripherally at best in histories of the cultural Cold War). Take the fundamentally different ...”