“... while the BP oil spill, and the subsequent poisoning of Gulf waters with dispersant chemicals, may surpass Katrina in both economic damage and loss of human life. Disaster is part of the character of the city: not just the trauma of past cataclysms, but the fear of what will come next, and how soon. In New Orleans’s first hundred years, the period ...”

“... not extend to lesser breeds within Europe, and certainly not beyond. He and the Liberal politician Richard Cobden believed that general amity would be reinforced by free trade and benign capitalism. Socialist thinkers, on the contrary, sought the abolition of capitalism and classes, and eventually of sovereign nations as well. Marx despised the wishy-washy ...”

“... Aquitaine famously accompanied her first husband, Louis VII of France, on the Second Crusade and may have participated in negotiations between him and her uncle, Raymond of Antioch. Much later, as queen of England, she represented her son Richard I while he was on the Third Crusade. At a humbler rank, the Cistercian monk ...”

“... list, who claims that he in fact owns the boat. The Italian media have suggested that Khudainatov may technically also be the owner of the 140-metre, $700 million Scheherazade, impounded in May 2022 by port authorities in Tuscany. Scheherazade is also sometimes referred to as ‘Putin’s boat’, or (according to the ...”

“... present. The apocalyptic aspects of science, with the next breakthrough just around the corner, may add to the distortion by a more general undervaluation of the past. And the distortion is often sealed by an appeal to history for corroboration of fashionable stereotypes of scientific method, the classic discoveries having been made by ‘prepared ...”

“... question is seen to be, not whether the new approaches are valid, but how much of the old may be seen to have survived their onslaught. With one significant exception, these books do not attempt to turn back the tide of recent historical scholarship, but express a mood in which the chief interest lies in discovering which parts of the old shoreline ...”

“... expected them to do; they did what the government expressly wanted them to do – even though it may well be that the government was quite ignorant of the long-term consequences of the policies which it forced on the business community and on the productive industry of Britain.’ A long and valuable section seems to confirm all we have always secretly ...”

“... of the lazy sod, the sod beneath the skin. Delaying isn’t an activity, with hidden meanings that may be of interest: here, it’s a gap in nature, or a sign of complete inactivity. This seems an increasingly unattractive line to take, usually emanating from people unable to grasp that some kinds of ‘work’ are pathological, and that a life that cannot ...”

“... taken by historical research are indicative of a nation’s broader preoccupations, then we may have to prepare ourselves for a religious revival of some magnitude. Religious explanations in history are all the rage – nowhere more so than in the study of the English Civil Wars. John Morrill, that panjandrum of Civil War revisionism, is reported to ...”

“... the grieving mother’s kidnapping, the Peacocks adopted the abducted little girl, who was renamed May and absorbed into the Peacock family, half sister, half servant? Johnson keeps a careful eye on May in the background of Mary Ellen’s more thrilling story. Spoiled, pretty, intelligent Mary Ellen complains about her ...”

“... to act without full or explicit orders and been praised for not ‘going by the book’. This may have allowed field commanders ‘to be creative’, but it also distorted the relationship between the army and the political leadership of the state. The example of the Golan Heights, occupied although Dayan and the government had decided not to do so, is ...”

“... down a few doors, leaning on unusual suspects. John Jasper is an avatar of the patricide painter Richard Dadd. Dadd, by this account, lost his marbles under an Egyptian sun, trying to keep pace with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. Phillips couldn’t keep still: he drove on remorselessly. As Seabrook sweeps through Egyptology, psychological profiling, snap ...”

“... in Paris. She would borrow Resnais’s apartment, investigate Blanchot for her translator friend Richard Howard, go to see the latest Godard film or visit the catacombs with her son. In the late 1960s, she fell in love with Nicole Stéphane, who had acted in Jean-Pierre Melville’s films but now produced her own. Stéphane, who was descended from the ...”

“... of expression might – only might – cease to be perceived as a menace to national security. As Richard Sakwa’s book suggests, Putin has a choice of two directions. One is simply to ‘reconcentrate state power’. The other is to ‘reconstitute’ that power in a new form by imposing the rule of law. Putin talks a lot about ‘the dictatorship of ...”

“... of themselves when they imagine they are performing for an audience of one. On the strength of Richard Mangan’s edition, we must assume that Gielgud’s contribution to the documenting of theatrical history will be uncertain (‘I had never noticed that Albee had such big ears!’) while his contribution to the understanding of bad character is ...”