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“... a fading sort of way Alfred the Great, are readily fitted into stories of national defiance. Pre-Conquest successes, like Bede and Offa and the highly creditable story of the English conversion and the missions to Germany and Scandinavia – these are no longer part of the national myth. Harriet Harvey Wood’s book in a sense restates and in a sense tries ...”

“... Robert Edward Lee​ was, in the universal judgment of his contemporaries, a beautiful man. Few Civil War generals inspired such commentary: ‘He stands fully six feet one inch in height,’ a New York Herald reporter wrote, ‘and weighs something over two hundred pounds, without being burdened with a pound of superfluous flesh ...”

“... poems makes a reader feel that he can only approve the poet’s judgment in not collecting them; Robert Conquest plunges the reader into an obscure background involving reciprocal limericks which were no doubt funny at the time but which are not (unlike those Monteith quotes) funny enough now. In the absence of any more exact sense of subject and ...”

“... imperial appetite: Paris dispatched the Army to Algeria and a retaliatory expedition turned into conquest. In secondary schools, even the most liberal history masters underplayed the gruesome details of that conquest as it evolved into full-scale colonisation. At the Lycée Henri IV, my republican, democratic textbook (the ...”

“... the Moors had ceased to rule Spain, Morocco was the one North African domain to resist Ottoman conquest, and it fended off European advances throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, succumbing formally to French rule only in 1912. Morocco’s proximity to Western Europe once struck fear into Christian hearts; today its closeness makes it a prime ...”

“... have not survived. (Beowulf exists only in one manuscript: others were lost to fire, shipwreck, conquest and monastic suppression.) Authorship practices in the multilingual literary culture of the time also play a role. Most Old English poetry and much prose is anonymous; compositions in Anglo-Latin are more likely to have an author’s name attached.Almost ...”

“... war to an end. France, Sumption writes, ‘suffered a complete internal collapse and a partial conquest by a foreign power’. His epic drama tells the story of a French tragedy as well as an English triumph, and he claims that the murder of Louis, duke of Orléans, by partisans of his rival John the Fearless, ‘opened one of the most wretched chapters of ...”

“... this excellent and superbly illustrated book – had put up a prize for the best poem on ‘the conquest of the air’, with a cruel proviso that no entry should exceed 300 verses (surely French vers, or lines). It seems the poems still lie in a musty box in the archives. Robert Wohl, who teaches European intellectual and ...”

“... by toadying family retainers or by people bent on destroying the Camelot myth. The historian Robert Dallek is neither; he decided to enter the field, as he explains in his introduction, in part because documents had become available that threw new light on several aspects of Kennedy’s life, and in part because he thought the old ones should be given a ...”

“... having theories about how to read books than about how to understand his friends. The Foreword to Robert M. Adams’s The Land and Literature of England gives some indication that this merely humane view of literature is now felt to be under threat. His bland intention is ‘to set forth the outlines of English history so that they may serve as background for ...”

“... their predecessors. The removal of the sacred object put me in mind of the sequence of theft and conquest that makes up any African nation’s history. There was the original theft that led to the conquest of the Queen of Sheba by Solomon: I wondered what would have happened if the Queen, the last of the powerful monarchs ...”

“... most young Italian intellectuals of the time, he was keen on sport, science, motor-cars, military conquest. He had written a penetrating study of Kipling, and a remarkable piece on the departure of a regiment for the Libyan adventure of 1912, an essay which combines patriotic fervour with a deep intelligence and self-questioning. Like so many others he died ...”

“... in May 1940, as a result of the failed Norwegian campaign, his stock had sunk fairly low but, as Robert Self points out, he continued to serve in Churchill’s government to such good effect that the latter made no bones about saying that Chamberlain was ‘the best man’ he had, ‘head and shoulders over the average man in the administration’. Attlee ...”

“... large Muslim population. That history is all too often reduced to a simplistic narrative of brutal conquest followed by ham-fisted rule. The episodes we call to mind are the prolonged and bloody wars in the Caucasus in the 19th century, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 20th, and the current conflict in Chechnya. This is beginning to change. The ...”

“... worse as technological advances reached distant, newly acquired colonies. The late 19th-century conquest of Africa coincided with the improvement of the machine-gun; and in the 20th century, the technique of killing at a distance was refined through aerial bombing, enabling opponents and troublemakers to be destroyed, with their families, at minimum cost ...”