“... political bureau in Damascus, who was in town for a medical procedure. Abbas gave him the green light, and two days later, under Egyptian mediation, an agreement was cobbled together. The announcement stunned Palestinians, including members of Fatah’s central committee: Abbas hadn’t bothered to inform his own people of the talks. I went to see ...”

“... indications that Lukács had the slightest notion of military matters. In an outfit of plus-fours, green stockings and heavy walking shoes he visited the trenches of the Red Army’s fifth division (which, as Kadarkay explains, was defending the Hungarian frontier against Czech troops), and addressed the lice-ridden ‘Budapest Red Army’ troops:   The ...”

“... the constitution was part of the Union bargain but spectacularly reneged on), the conditions for Daniel O’Connell’s creation of a popular political machine lay readily to hand. In 1828, as ‘the representative of the suffering of my country’, the Kerry gentleman-lawyer threatened the whole British parliamentary system by winning a by-election though ...”

“... of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, and Jake Hartley, Anthony Frampton, Christopher Kershaw, Daniel Wade and Daniel Wilford of the Yorkshire Regiment. All except Coupe, a sergeant and father of two children, were aged between 19 and 21. They died in Afghanistan in March 2012, out on patrol in Helmand province, when ...”

“... at the University of Essex scrapped the Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution that Daniel Libeskind had been commissioned to design three years before. The cost of this change of direction has been well buried in the accounts, as happens in such matters. The new business studies centre houses a Big Data facility, and promises spaces for ...”

“... loathed by the general, reporting from Islamabad and asserting that the US Embassy had given the green light to the coup because it regarded the chief justice as a nuisance and wrongly believed him to be ‘a Taliban sympathiser’. Certainly no US spokesperson or State Department adjunct in the Foreign Office criticised the dismissal of the eight Supreme ...”

“... North America, would be defeated by American hunter heroes, fictional and historical: figures like Daniel Boone, Natty Bumppo and Davy Crockett – white men who replaced female captives as protagonists in the developing frontier mythology. In hunter hero stories, ‘violence is the only remedy for humiliation, fear and trauma, and it will be administered in ...”

“... may irreparably alter some colours in a painting (a red lake fading away, a copper resinate green turning brown), it is possible that the removal of a discoloured varnish will create a discordant effect which outweighs the advantages of returning some portions to their original condition. There is surely no one correct approach for conservators to ...”

“... Cooper, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Kris Kristofferson, and Natasha and Daniel Bedingfield have variously done before him. The father, of course, the Abraham, or at least the son of the father, the Avraham ben Avraham Avinu, the Charlton Heston of redemption rock, is Johnny Cash, a man of intense spiritual certitude, and enormous ...”

“... proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The blustering, obscene, insatiable, limitlessly restless ...”

“... accompany him and Satie would entertain them with his knowledge of Parisian history. Pierre-Daniel Templier, his first biographer, painted a charming picture of Satie on the move: ‘When talking he would stop, bend one knee a little, adjust his pince-nez and place his fist on his hip. Then he would take off once more with small, deliberate steps.’He ...”

“... was it?’ a man asks. ‘In a plastic bag on the porch,’ a woman answers. They are Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) – Georges and Anne, Georg and Anna, George and Ann are names Haneke likes to give his couples – and they are inside their house watching a videotape taken of the outside of the house. This is the very footage we ...”

“... interest of his later writing about Wales has been demonstrated in the 2003 collection edited by Daniel Williams and entitled Who Speaks for Wales?, to which Smith gives handsome acknowledgment). But the Williams of the period covered here was in some ways more Leavisite than Bevanite, stronger on ‘our responses’ to changes in ‘English society since ...”

“... but for most conscripts it was their first time overseas. Enchanted by the landscape, the blue-green sky and the dramatic bay of Algiers, they sent home postcards of 19th-century paintings. ‘The topics of Orientalism are there,’ Branche writes, ‘in a folkloric eternity from which war and modernity are excluded.’ As they travelled into the ...”

“... Darwin’s idea of evolution through natural selection – his ‘dangerous idea’ – was, as Daniel Dennett famously said, ‘the single best idea anyone has ever had’. Better than any idea of Newton’s or Einstein’s, and better than any idea had by Jesus or Aristotle or Hume or that other great 12 February 1809 birthday boy, Abraham Lincoln. It ...”