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“... The​ old man told my French nephew that he had something special to show him. Something he had thought best to keep in a drawer since 1943. In that village, families at Christmas decorate their crib with santons – figurines of the Holy Family, the three kings, the shepherds, an angel. But the old man was holding out an extra santon. It was a tiny statuette of Marshal Pétain ...”

“... Most of us grew up – or were born – during the Cold War. We were formed by a quite extraordinary period, by events which did not take place rather then events which did. We never ceased to feel horror at the period’s architecture, ending in a wall of fire which we could at moments see quite plainly ahead of us. But over time we lost much of our sense of abnormality, imagining that there had been similar intervals in history when the known world had been partitioned between adversaries heavily armed but reluctant to shoot first ...”

“... It’s a​ disgusting case – her face lights up whenever that animated little deformity so much as turns to her.’ This was Diana Manners, writing to her fiancé, Duff Cooper, in 1919. ‘Her’ was Venetia Montagu, the light of Herbert Asquith’s life when he was prime minister, but now sharing a Paris hotel room with a small, grinning Canadian millionaire ...”

“... On the night of 4 February 1983, Klaus Barbie was sitting on the cold metal floor of a transport aircraft. Kidnapped in Bolivia, the former head of the Gestapo in Lyon was being flown back to French territory, to be charged with crimes against humanity. As the hours passed, Barbie answered some of the questions put to him by a journalist. Much of his talk was a sulky protest about the illegality of his seizure ...”

“... Romantic nationalists​ relish the idea of a national essence. ‘When was Serbia truly Serbian?’ Or as Gwyn Alf Williams put it, with a historian’s affectionate irony: ‘When was Wales?’ German nationalism, especially in the 19th century, answered this question in several ways. ‘When Arminius/Hermann and his Teutons cut down the Roman legions,’ or ‘When Rhenish castles echoed with knightly combat and the lays of minstrels,’ were two possible responses ...”

“... When they heard that Britain was sending troops to recover the Falklands, many in this country were inclined to laugh. Some farcical anti-climax was expected – Anguilla on a wider stage, with penguins. Events which soon followed, ending with Mrs Thatcher taking the salute at a victory parade, have made it hard to remember why it all at first seemed so comic ...”

“... Less​ than a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a travelling exhibition arrived in Kerch on the Crimean Peninsula. Filling several rooms in the Kerch museum, it was a display – a small selection – of the gifts laid at the feet of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev while he was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the second most powerful man in the world ...”

“... Looking at the imperial magnificence, the Habsburgian gigantism of public buildings in Edinburgh and Glasgow, you want to ask: where did all that wealth go? Looking at the stone ruins in the bracken of Lowland and Highland hills, you want to ask: where did all those people go – and why? These are questions rooted in the history of the British Empire, and they concern the very distinct and remarkable and sometimes shocking part which the Scots – the traders and the plebeians, the Lanarkshire industrialists and the Gaelic poor – played in the development of that empire ...”

“... Seven years after his death, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s reputation is still a cauldron of discord. He would have enjoyed that. Steaming in the mix are the resentments of those he expertly wounded, the awe of colleagues at the breadth and depth of his learning, dismay at his serial failures to complete a full-length work of history, delight in the Gibbonian wit and elegance of his writing and – still a major ingredient – Schadenfreude over his awful humiliation in the matter of the Hitler diaries ...”

“... Revolution is a staircase. In February 1848, the poet Lamartine found himself in charge of a Paris revolution, from an upper floor in the Hôtel de Ville. He identified on the staircase something as specific as a tornado: a roaring double helix formed of those fighting their way upwards and those pressing downwards. It appears whenever a society mutinies and decides to make a new world ...”

“... Sixty-one years ago, two miserable German youths were crouching in a rainy hole under a groundsheet. Around them, in the same field behind barbed wire, thousands of other prisoners of war waited to find out what the Americans would do with them. To keep their minds off their hunger and the cold, the two boys – one from Danzig, the other a Bavarian – played dice and talked about their plans for the future, supposing that there would be a future ...”

“... It  was breakfast time​  in the Europejski Hotel, that cold November morning in Warsaw forty years ago, when the waitresses suddenly stood still. Their eyes widened; they turned towards the radio. One of them softly began to sing along with the march now blaring across the room. But how did she, born a dozen years after Poland’s communist regime banned them, know those words and that melody? ‘My, Pierwsza Brygada’ – ‘We, the First Brigade ...”

“... Watched from a safe distance, Arthur Koestler’s life was like a Catherine-wheel breaking free from its stake. Leaping and spinning and scattering crowds, emitting fountains of alarming flares and sparks as it bounded in and out of public squares and unexpected back gardens, flinging dazzling light into dim minds, Koestler’s career left scorch marks and illuminations across the 20th century ...”

“... On​ a Berlin street corner, just off Friedrichstrasse, there is a faded bronze plaque set into the wall. ‘Here on 18 March 1848, barricade fighters defended themselves against the troops of the Second Royal Regiment of Prussia who, hours later, refused orders to resume the attack.’ Then come three lines of verse: ‘Es kommt dazu trotz alledem/Dass rings der Mensch die Bruderhand/dem Menschen reicht trotz alledem ...”

“... It was​ the spring of 1990, and the train from Warsaw to Vilnius had crossed the frontier. The carriage had been lifted off European rails onto the broad-gauge Russian chassis, and the fresh green forests of what was still Soviet Lithuania were flowing past the windows. I had not been in the Soviet Union for a few years – not since the advent of Gorbachev and perestroika ...”