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“... At the military academy in Saint-Cyr, which he entered in 1908, Charles de Gaulle was known as ‘the great asparagus’. But aside from the fact that he stood six feet four in his socks it was his character that drew attention: he was rebellious yet aloof, sceptical yet sure of himself. Not everyone admired his manner and his height could be a nuisance ...”

“... At the time of the parliamentary elections in Serbia earlier this summer, the possibility that Radovan Karadzic, once the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, might be handed over to stand trial at The Hague seemed remote. The acquittal of the former KLA leader Ramush Haradinaj in April had stunned opinion in Serbia and added to the sense that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was a Serb-grinding machine which spat out Bosnians, Kosovo Albanians and Croats intact ...”

“... The commune​ of Gurs in the foothills of the Pyrenees is famous for its internment camp, built by the French to house fugitives from Spain after the Republic fell to Franco in 1939. A succession of internees went through the camp before it closed on New Year’s Eve 1945. With the Spanish Republicans came International Brigade volunteers who couldn’t get home – Germans, Austrians, Poles ...”

“... There are​ times when French secularism and jihadist violence seem locked in a struggle to the bitter end. Last autumn was one of them. In September, two people were stabbed outside the former offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. In October, Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old teacher in the Conflans-Sainte-Honorine suburb of Paris, was beheaded after he showed two Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to pupils during a civics class on freedom of expression ...”

“... Awoman waits​ in a bare room for a meeting with her lover, who has been detained as an anti-colonial agitator. He is escorted from the cells by a Portuguese plain-clothes officer. This is Angola, sometime in the 1960s. The couple embrace; he asks for news of their children. Waiting outside, the security man overhears the woman promise to bring the prisoner a ‘full suit’ on her next visit ...”

“... The first was a Bible with a hard yellowish binding, ivory it was said, a baptism gift to ‘Jeremy’ and signed by the composer Haydn Wood – a friend of Colin’s parents, I suppose – who’d written the popular tune ‘Roses of Picardy’ in 1916. Above his signature, he’d copied out a few bars from the refrain, along with the words by Fred ...”

“... Travelling in West Africa a little over forty years ago, Basil Davidson was shown around the chamber of the new territorial assembly in Bamako, built by the French as a concession to the growing demand for independence in Mali. The chairman of the assembly ‘pointed with a cautious smile to the plaster-white figure of the French state symbol on the chamber wall above his ceremonial chair ...”

“... Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud, poet and ex-poet, took a 41 shoe – about a seven and a half in British sizes, an American eight. We have his own word on this, in a letter written shortly before his death at the age of 37, requesting a stocking for varicose veins. The jaunty teenager smoking a pipe in Verlaine’s famous sketch – dearer to Rimbaud’s admirers than the simpering soul in Fantin-Latour’s group portrait of the same year – has elegant legs ...”

“... The noises of the sperm whale are unlike the lyric hootings and musings of the humpback, whose ‘songs’ won him a place in the LP charts in the 1970s. Recordings of the humpback were no doubt helped by the fact that ‘true whales’ – those species, to which he belongs, equipped with strips of whalebone and long pelmets of baleen in their mouths for sieving their food – seldom dive more than a few hundred metres ...”

“... National sovereignty, in the remains of Yugoslavia, has been a punishing master. It has evicted some in the name of an old arrangement that they never fully took account of – this, by and large, has been the fate of Kosovo Albanians – and others in the name of new arrangements that took no account of them: this is the fate of vast numbers of Serbs ...”

“... What we eat is what we talk about. Red meat v. non-red, all meat v. no meat at all, GM v. organic, long haul v. local, dirty v. ‘environmental’ and so on; how we prepare a dish, how Heston Blumenthal does it. What makes these conversations possible is the abundance we’re now accustomed to: plenty is the medium in which our anxieties, our pleasures and even our ‘ethics’ thrive ...”

“... When​ they gathered at roads and roundabouts at the end of last year, the French government was caught off guard. Within a week of their first nationwide mobilisation, they were turning out regularly at intersections across the country to slow up traffic, and marching through Paris and the big provincial cities. Hasty polls announced that 70 or 80 per cent of the population, including many in France’s largest conurbations, supported this massive show of impatience ...”

“... London, April 2019.​ Police have confined supporters of the environmentalist movement Extinction Rebellion (XR) at Marble Arch after more than a week of protests. The activists decide to disperse, but a mural remains at the site: a young girl with a spade has just planted a sapling; she is holding a plant label with the XR logo, an hourglass in a circle ...”

“... Migration is said to be good for host cultures. Geographers, demographers and business people believe it is, especially in the US, where one migrant group after another – Jews, Poles, Italians, Irish – has auditioned for a role in the great musical of American identity. The competition has been bitter, especially between newcomers and predecessors, and the typecasting has been crude, yet sooner or later every minority earns its place in the chorus ...”

“... Angola​ is no longer a colonial fiction,’ Ricardo Soares de Oliveira writes in Magnificent and Beggar Land, even though it was a ruined, inchoate slab of territory during the last years of Portuguese rule and then for decades after independence. ‘There now is,’ he goes on, ‘fifty years and one million dead later, an Angola where everyone is pulled into a single political society ...”