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“... Most of the institutions around us seem to have infancies – or at least paths of evolution along which they staggered in order to become what they are today. Representative democracy, a civil service, even contemporary war descend to us through strange-looking ancestors: the executioners of kings, the treasurer keeping the royal gold under his bed, the marquis riding with his tenantry into the cannon ...”

“... For the last six months, a Scot reading the London papers, or watching London-made political TV shows, could only conclude that a sharp dislike of Scots and Scotland is spreading across South Britain. The reports suggest a bout of Scotophobia without parallel since the violently anti-Scottish mood of the English mob in Lord Bute’s day. The ignorance and nastiness of some of this journalism have been startling ...”

“... In a lawless and consequently weak state, man is defenceless and unfree. The stronger the state, the freer the individual. Vladimir Putin, ‘Open Letter to Russian Voters’, 25 February 2000 The answer to ‘where have we heard that before?’ is usually: ‘in Russia.’ The notion of despotism masquerading as liberation was part of the Victorian liberal stereotype of tsardom ...”

“... Long ago, when I was stumbling through the Malayan jungle in search of ‘Communist terrorists’ (or ‘bandits’, as the British colonial authorities quaintly called them), I heard a story from some other marines. One day, a young marine had left his patrol to wash in a forest stream. He suddenly found himself facing a group of Chinese guerrillas led by a slim woman with a pistol ...”

“... Eighty years​ have gone by. But there’s still no agreement on how the Spanish Civil War should be remembered. Nor should there be. The real tribute to the force of that human firestorm is the contest of judgments and feelings which still smoulders and still causes pain. Where should the focus be? For many, simply on the stories: the recounting of sacrificial courage and suffering ...”

“... In a corner​ of the eastern Mediterranean, where the coast of Anatolia turns south towards Syria, a mountain massif rises by the sea. Its name in Ottoman times was Musa Dagh, the Moses Mountain, and its summit forms a high plateau called the Damlayik. Just over a century ago, as the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was reaching its climax, four thousand Armenian villagers living round the foot of the mountain left their houses ...”

“... That bloody woman!’ James Hamilton-Paterson’s mother was not given to outbursts. Then in her eighties, she had worked in the National Health Service for most of her life. But when she came across the three teenage girls (they might have been her own granddaughters) sitting on cardboard and begging in Victoria Station, something gave way. She broke into tears – but tears of rage ...”

“... Most​ successful conspiracies are home-cooked – designed and carried out by men and women in their own nation (that leaves aside mere assassinations or terror bombings, which are frequently committed by intruders). It’s rare to come across a full-dress conspiracy, a planned scheme to overthrow and replace a government by violence, successfully mounted by one country against another ...”

“... On the last page​ of his book about his father, Patrick Cockburn writes that Claud ‘disbelieved strongly in the axiom about “telling truth to power”, knowing that the rulers of the earth have no wish to hear any such thing. Much more effective, he believed, is to tell truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions ...”

“... Catherine​ would have understood. Like Vladimir Putin, the Empress Catherine II couldn’t rest until her soldiers’ boots had stamped the space between Russia and Western Europe into an obedient lawn. For Putin, so far, the space is Ukraine. For her, Robert Burns’s evil ‘Auld Kate’, it was Poland, though not the compact Polish state of today ...”

“... The 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall was merrier than the tenth. In 1999, Berlin was in the middle of a hangover. The European Union was plagued by doubts about its future course; the bloodbath in the former Yugoslavia had unnerved optimists; the Russian economy had collapsed; the sullen misery and unemployment in what had been East Germany seemed to mock the hopes of real unification ...”

“... What you felt on seeing the Berlin Wall depended greatly on the Berlin you had seen before. Frederick Taylor first visited Berlin as a schoolboy in 1965, when the Wall had already been up for some years. He presumably thought of other normal, undivided cities he knew, and was horrified. And anyone who had known Berlin before the Second World War was horrified in the same way ...”

“... Deutscher’s Trotsky was thought by two generations – his own and its successor – to be one of the great works of biography. The first volume emerged in 1954, soon after the death of Stalin. The last appeared in 1963, at a time when the Soviet Union still seemed strong and confident, and when there remained hopes (not only on the left) that reforms leading towards a Soviet version of democratic socialism might one day be resumed ...”

“... Written​ constitutions? ‘Because of where I came from, these documents seemed profoundly exotic.’ In spite of where she came from, which was England, Linda Colley became many years ago the first English intellectual to explain to her nation just how exotic ‘Britishness’ was. Now, with the same pioneering enthusiasm, she has produced a book about constitutions ...”

“... Astate​ can suddenly vanish, leaving familiar streets under new flags. All Europeans know that. But how can a country’s smell vanish? East Germany had its own unique and unmistakeable niff, its Staatsduft, if you like. It enfolded you as soon as you entered the frontier controls: Chinese cigarettes, the fumes of two-stroke cars, the smoke of brown coal briquettes, the whiff of the state disinfectant, Wofasept ...”