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“... some tufts of wool and dried grasses. Dr Johnson’s famous description of them in 1771, which Lawrence Freedman uses to open this history, has scarcely been challenged: a bleak and gloomy solitude, an island thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, and barren in summer; an island which not even southern savages have dignified with ...”

“... nuclear war could be won. In Britain the leading defence intellectuals, including Michael Howard, Lawrence Freedman, and John Erickson, continued to press the case for deterrence, détente and multilateral disarmament. Whether they played any part in steering the world away from a catastrophe I do not know and neither, perhaps, do they. But at the very ...”

“... with the US and the disastrous wars Britain was involved in by blindly adhering to US priorities.Lawrence Freedman is the most distinguished figure in the British defence intelligentsia. He has written authoritatively on the history of nuclear strategy and was the official historian of the Falklands campaign. As a contributor to various magazines and TV ...”

“... situation, and what is the role of the British nuclear arsenal? The latter question is analysed in Lawrence Freedman’s serious and thought-provoking book, Britain and Nuclear Weapons. To the first question, why Britain should have nuclear weapons, he cannot discover any very clear answer. The arguments have changed over the years, but the policy of ...”

“... Throughout the Cold War, the British Army poured most of its resources into training and equipping for ‘the big one’, the day the Red Juggernaut would come rumbling across Europe and bring with it the most destructive warfare imaginable. The fact that British soldiers were fighting and dying at various times in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and the Falklands was an annoying detail to many senior officers and planners in Whitehall, a distraction from what defence was meant to be about ...”

“... to decide whether to spend large sums on building Polaris with far less US help or to give it up. Lawrence Freedman has written of the reasons for the decision to proceed with the programme: ‘The low cost of Polaris was an extremely influential factor … The main reason for this was the enormous American subsidy in making available information ...”

“... to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not. Just after the war started, Samuel Freedman reported that ‘a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.’ Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on ...”