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“... 800 million countrymen: wheat has a higher nutritional value than rice. That year, a 25-year-old French grain trader, Jean-Yves Ollivier, travelled to Hong Kong and crossed the Sham Chun River, the natural border with mainland China, to enter the town of Shenzhen, then hardly more than a fishing village. The far bank was dotted with red flags, portraits of ...”

“... On 1 October 1949​ , Mao Zedong stood on top of the Gate of Heavenly Peace to proclaim the victory of his revolution, and told the world that the long-suffering Chinese people had finally ‘stood up’. After decades of tremendous violence and turmoil, China was going to relaunch itself into the arduous and disorienting task of embracing modernity ...”

“... In​ his monumental biography of De Gaulle, Jean Lacouture describes a meeting of the Free French in London in 1941 at which several of the younger members expressed their admiration for Churchill. In response De Gaulle warned them ‘never to forget that within him breathes the soul of Pitt’. What he meant was that every true Englishman is, at least potentially, an opponent of France ...”

“... As he looks forward to his 70th birthday Sir Michael Howard can also look back over a distinguished career which began with Wellington, Christ Church and the Coldstream Guards. In 1943, as Lieutenant Howard, fresh from the University, he led his platoon in a dangerous uphill charge against a German position north of Salerno ...”

“... some of his rivals. Charles Brandon was part of a coterie of special favourites, with Edward Howard, Thomas Knyvett and Henry Guildford. In 1512, the young king went to war with France. Charles was given command of troops for a sea attack on Brittany, to be led by Edward Howard. With Thomas Knyvett on board, the Regent ...”

“... social change. Recently a number of younger historians – Kathleen Birk, Keith Neilson, and David French in his first book British Economic and Strategic Planning 1905-1915 – have begun to consider some of the key questions of finance and economics. But until now nobody has tried to put all this specialist work together. The last oeuvre de synthèse was Sir ...”

“... of the British armies in France was safer in his hands than in those of the mercurial Sir John French, whose incompetence at the Battle of Loos he was quite right to expose. Haig then presided successfully over the expansion of the British armies in France from 200,000 to over two million men. The offensives on the Somme and at Passchendaele may have been ...”

“... on them. There is nothing wrong with any of these versions, and there is no court of appeal in the French text. As Prendergast puts it, ‘no one has monopoly powers over the “correct”.’ We can prefer one version to another, but then we are choosing one understanding over another: either (mostly) the understanding we ourselves have, or (better) an ...”

“... mainly to its single-minded concentration on the personality of the hero as revealed by Alan Howard’s performance. This dominated the production and whatever our personal opinions might have been, it was clearly a grand achievement. It had an immediate appeal, and that is a final, or almost final, dramatic test. I have not myself seen it, but the ...”

“... notion of the exhaustion of discourses, which connects perhaps indirectly with some contemporary French criticism, and with Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). These ideas may seem to yield the pedigree of the book, and are arguably the source of some falsification of the cultural history, as well as much that is of positive ...”

“... had confronted American generals since the establishment of their Republic, as it had confronted French generals from the outbreak of the Revolution. For them society no longer provided a ready-made hierarchy of command. The Napoleonic Wars still provided openings for heroic leadership but by the time of the American Civil Wars these had been firmly closed ...”

“... it necessary at all. The Navy, so it was hoped, would defend our shores (probably against the French) and the Army would police, and where necessary extend, the Empire. Both Services went their own ways to general public approval, so long as they made minimal demands on the taxpayer. Then the humiliations suffered by the Army in the Boer War, and the ...”

“... He was almost kingly in status. His first cousins included two queens (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard). He spent four years of his youth as the companion of Henry VIII’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy. Howard blood was blue enough to pose a threat to the succession, as Surrey’s uncle Thomas discovered when he was ...”

“... It was with these that the UN was initially called on to deal. In the Netherlands East Indies, in French Indochina, in the Indian subcontinent, above all in the former British mandate of Palestine, successor regimes fought the former colonial power or each other for international recognition and territorial control. When circumstances were propitious, they ...”

“... I transcribe here the real name of this family: they are called – and what name could be more French? – Larivière. (Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations in English are taken from D.J. Enright’s revised translation.) This passage is astonishing for a number of reasons, but principally for showing us a writer, famed for his advocacy of the ...”