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“... many former Allied fighter pilots who admitted to deliberately strafing – killing with cannon, rockets and bombs – civilians in Germany during the relatively carefree days just before the war ended. My point is not to suggest that the American soldiers who committed the My Lai massacre behaved no worse than British or French soldiers in similar ...”

“... undignified and unnatural circus tricks. At the end of this formidable survey of the aristocracy John Beckett notes that they have survived into the late 20th century ‘as protectors of the nation’s heritage’ and that some ‘even argue that as collectors of beautiful objects over time their families were thinking not merely of self-interest but of the ...”

“... He gives short histories of dozens of Bunyan’s contemporaries, noting, for instance, that John Kelyng, the judge who bullied Bunyan in 1661, had done 18 years in prison himself and had ‘grounds for feeling vengeful’; that Paul Cobb, the seemingly feeble Clerk of the Peace who tried to let Bunyan off, went on to become mayor twenty years later when ...”

“... power. The British did not observe the rules when they blew Indian mutineers from the mouths of cannon. The Americans did not observe the rules when at war with the Red Indians, and of course the Red Indians also did not observe them. In fact, the laws of war were until recently confined to Europe, though Best ends by chronicling the present-day attempts to ...”

“... retaining it and FIFA be damned – what is this about ‘Englishness’? It is this question that John Lucas sets himself to answer, in considering the poetry of two centuries. He has one immediate cultural handicap: he cannot refrain from sniping at his own side (the English), as if to provide credentials of fairness. But what he says often seems more ...”

“... of this quasi-military operation, which involved the use of sledgehammers, armoured cars, water cannon and hundreds of riot police, was to remove an Irish tricolour from the window of McMillen’s office. Adams says in Before the Dawn that he played no part in the rioting, the worst Belfast had seen for many years, but was left wondering why it needed to be ...”

“... until the last half of this, the third game. A bit like not bothering to vote for Jospin say I. John was watching the game in a local French café called Gastro. On the final whistle he commiserated with the owner. ‘Of course,’ shrugged M. le Patron, in a what-do-you-expect way, ‘most of the team play in England.’ Superb. The Irish record in World ...”

“... stress, engage like the French in ‘collective indiscipline’, refusing to be used as cannon-fodder in useless attacks? They can find ‘no convincing explanations’. The French, as they rightly point out, had suffered a far worse blood sacrifice, notably at Verdun (in the final reckoning French casualties, like those of Germany, were twice the ...”

“... grasp, leaving him clutching the chestnut wig.’The same scene is described in the prologue of John Guy’s My Heart Is My Own, the latest biography of Mary Queen of Scots:And then the final twist. As the executioner lifted up the head, Mary’s auburn curls and white cap became detached from her skull. The illusion of monarchy was dissolved as the ...”

“... in a little: ‘A hand or eye/By Hilliard drawn is worth an history/By a worse painter made,’ John Donne wrote in 1597. By a ‘history’ he means one of those big, populous, often Italian paintings much in demand among Elizabethan collectors – paintings you stand back from to see the drama of some mythological or biblical episode unfold. No one stands ...”

“... customised berets, perished Sam Brownes, crudely dyed battledress.Sure enough, the rain starts to cannon down – the ‘worst storm anyone in north Wales could recall’. The Meades family enjoy wading in the wetness and reach safety in the cafeteria at the summit. But a 34-year-old man called John Mattinson who left the ...”

“... us would think that a beheading is a far greater threat than a sunburn.’ They could have picked John Kasich, a former Congressman and Fox News host, currently governor of Ohio. Known throughout his career as a phlegmatic and abusive man, widely disliked in Congress, he underwent an image makeover for the presidential campaign. He became, in his own words, a ...”

“... the ship settles, the mast-top will still be above the waves; the pitching overboard of cargo and cannon to lighten ship and the jettisoning of masts; the battening down of hatches, causing panic and asphyxiation below; the frenzied toiling at the pumps, which be come choked with wheat, coffee or potash according to cargo; the improvising of rafts, which ...”

“... a sinister beauty and the power to inspire wonder. Botting cannot resist borrowing for an epigraph John Masefield’s tribute to the great sailing ships: ‘They mark our passage as a race of men,/Earth will not see such ships as these again.’ This lively book is a zeppelin history which concentrates on the round-the-world voyage of the Graf Zeppelin in ...”

“... must have had a good deal to do with it. The phrase ‘ways of seeing’ crops up, reminding us of John Berger and his allegedly penetrating double squint. The authorial assumption which remains unquestioned at the end of the book – after 350 pages in which the word ‘spatial’ appears rarely fewer than three times per paragraph and sometimes twice in the ...”