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“... the manager to complain that a terrible mistake had been made. How could little ‘Jonny’ Steinberg be 50? The trouble was the manager was not in her office. On impulse I rang People Express and booked a seat to New York in early April. As soon as I saw the Manhattan skyline my dream returned. ‘You’re really here; you’re really in New ...”

“... On 20 July 1943 the Polish artist Jonasz Stern was executed along with hundreds of other Jews of the Lwow ghetto by SS machine-gun fire. He awoke from a faint to find himself alive, buried under the corpses of the entire neighbourhood, covered in other people’s blood and excrement, the only survivor on Janowski Street. Two of the books reviewed here are about survivors, people who turned right instead of left, ran instead of lingering or lingered instead of running, those who met kindly Polish peasants or had ‘good faces’ – did not look Jewish, that is to say – individuals who survived, crazily, randomly, inexplicably, when everybody else, not just their families but neighbours, associates at work, team-mates, local shopkeepers, their whole world, was murdered ...”

“... So you think it comes from the Arabic?’ says the first character. ‘Very probably, my dear fellow, very probably,’ replies the second, ‘but on the subject of words, our science is anything but secure ... Here for example is Petrocchi who spells the word with two f’s: “a union of persons of every grade and type who help each other in their mutual interest without respect for the law or morality” ...”

“... There are not many historians who matter. Not many whose works have changed the way people see themselves. Of that little list, there is an even smaller number whose works have mattered to those in another society. The obscure American naval captain Alfred Thayer Mahan was one. His Strategy of Sea Power, published in 1890, had earned him honorary degrees in Oxford and Cambridge by 1893: Mahan told an anxious British public what it most wanted to hear about its navy ...”

“... On 25 November 1882, Iolanthe; or, The Peer and the Peri was performed for the first time at the Savoy Theatre. In Act II, a restless Lord Chancellor, troubled by lovesickness rather than the expense of his furnishings, cannot sleep. As he wanders through his lodgings, he sings the famous ‘Nightmare Song’. One of the elements of the nightmare is what would now be called a venture capital scheme – to plant retailers as vegetables to get their goods to sprout: The shares are a penny and ever so many are                  taken by Rothschild and Baring; And just as a few are allotted to you, you           awake with a shudder despairing ...”

“... On 18 October 1881, Crown Prince Frederick William of Germany and Prussia marked his 50th birthday with a gloomy entry in his diary. He had been waiting to succeed to the throne for twenty years and his indomitable father refused to do the decent thing. At 84, the old man simply would not die. Worse, his ‘over-mighty subject’ Otto von Bismarck, in spite of constant illness and breakdowns, continued to exercise his power over the old emperor ...”

“... Seymour Hersh belongs to that small group of American newspaper reporters who made national reputations during the Vietnam War and Watergate. He won a Pultizer Prize in 1970 for his exposure of the My Lai massacre. He exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia and the role of the CIA in toppling the Allende regime in Chile. He tracked down evidence of CIA spying within the United States and exposed it ...”

“... A Calabrian who now lives in Rome told me a revealing story about the Mafia. An uncle, aged 90, rang up from the ancestral village absolutely furious. ‘Do you know, Vincenzo,’ he spluttered, ‘they actually threatened me?’ There is more than a casual connection between the insulted old gentleman and the murdered General Dalla Chiesa. Both are signs that the old Mafia is gone, a Mafia which, no matter how brutal and violent, knew its betters ...”

“... I knew who Harry Kessler was of course, ‘the red count’, the Junker aristocrat who supported the Weimar Republic, and wrote a diary which I used in my seminars. Well, it turns out he wasn’t a Junker; indeed, it’s hard to say what he actually was. Imagine somebody who was at once an English public school boy, a French-born art critic and a Prussian guards officer ...”

“... 1983 is the most important election since the war,’ said my Italian friend, a sociologist, exultantly. ‘After nearly forty years everything is in flux.’ I had rung him the day after the election. He could hardly speak for excitement. The country was stunned. The results had completely flattened the opinion polls, which has been caught with their predictions down ...”

“... diplomats and generals said no. Such is the tangled and perplexing sequence of events that Jonathan Steinberg undertakes to unravel. He adds that the same story occurred in Greece, and subsequently in South-Eastern France following the Allied landings in North Africa and the Axis takeover of what had previously been the Unoccupied Zone. For 13 ...”

“... close up can we see how perilous and uncertain many of the steps he took appeared at the time. As Jonathan Steinberg shows in this superb biography, there was nothing preordained about Bismarck’s successes. Had the war with Denmark not revived his fortunes he might well have disappeared from Prussian and German politics for ever after the 1862 ...”

“... also explain the differential roles of European nations in the Holocaust. In his All or Nothing, Jonathan Steinberg contrasts the German and Italian cultures of complicity to explain why most Jews under Italian rule escaped death. He ends with the devastating line, ‘Nobody obeyed in Italy anyway’ – Zivilcourage, Italian ...”

“... How bad will it be? In a paper to a recent conference in Durban on the economic impact of Aids, Jonathan Broomberg, Malcolm Steinberg and Patrick Masobe constructed a complex actuarial model to take into account the fact that the epidemic’s doubling time is likely to slow down as it progresses. In the very early stages ...”

“... knots as some of Butterfield’s followers have done, he has his own distinctive historiography. Jonathan Steinberg argues in this book that Hinsley believes that men in politics behave as rational beings. To go to war is not an irrational act, nor is nationalism a meaningless emotion. What is more, Hinsley believes that in international relations men ...”