“... to Europe’s displaced persons, mostly but not all Jews, in the run-up to the Second World War was partial, insufficient and often less than wholehearted. Yet the temptation to romanticise this piece of the past persists, aided by the fact that exile is a word whose charge has been somewhat blunted by an inclination to celebrate the positive aspects of ...”

“... by John Buchan on which it’s based began to appear in serial form, in the middle of one world war; and the summer of 1935, when the odds on the imminent outbreak of another were shortening by the day. The film takes from the novel its title, the name of the protagonist (but not of anyone else), the narrative structure of a journey from London to Scotland ...”

“... devoted in a slightly distant way to his lady, leader of a loyal band of ready and lower-class fighters who are often comic and even a little oafish’. Knight traces these changes through a vast number of texts, from the early ballads and gestes, as well as plays, games, references and songs, through romantic novels and plays, to end up in ...”

“... any longer than necessary’. Iraqi nationalism was at a low ebb during the sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia in Baghdad in 2006-7, but as sectarian slaughter has declined it has begun to reassert itself. There is an edgy mood both in the Iraqi government and among ordinary Iraqis. The number of dead bodies being picked up in the streets of ...”

“... its deeper preoccupation with repression and psychic conflict. It was his Common Sense about the War that brought Shaw for the first time obloquy: all the common sense was lost on a war-feverish public, and the advice to the soldiers of both sides to shoot their officers and go home was not taken in good part. It was a ...”

“... had been to bring about German unity. They were the true patriots, the West German political class the traitors to the nation. Was it not Ludwig Erhard who, at American instigation, introduced a new currency, Konrad Adenauer who put liberal capitalism above unity, the Western allies who rejected Stalin’s offer of a neutral united Germany in 1952? Once ...”

“... He also wrote one well-received novel, The Gardener who saw God. He spent the Second World War in the United States, largely in California, where he was for a time attracted by the then fashionable mysticism of Gerald Heard. He also discovered Mexico, where he was later to spend much money building follies near Xilitla. After the ...”

“... glamour of outlaws recycling the wealth of the city. Conrad is hardest on his professional middle-class characters, living comfortably in their sterilised tower blocks but obsessed with the valley and its symbolism. Paul, an architect with what seem rather dated Modernist views, dreams of obliterating the valley by covering it over with a cantilevered ...”

“... The now famous design for the angled black granite walls, carved with the names of the 58,000 US war dead and cut into the ground on the Mall in Washington DC, was selected through a blind competition. Its abstraction offended those hoping for a properly heroic tribute, but more troubling to some was the identity of the designer, Maya Lin, a 21-year-old Yale ...”

“... could be trusted by Israeli Jews – Palestinian citizens of Israel are now officially second-class – to manage the occupation, and to expedite the various tasks the Jewish state has mastered: killing Gazans, bulldozing homes, combating the scourge of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS), and conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. With ...”

“... base on the coast of Greenland to which Kavenna makes a bleak trip at the end of her book. A Cold War relic, Thule Air Base survives in a scaled-down way, on perpetual standby in the new War on Terror: about as limp a pretext for a military base inside the Arctic Circle as one could imagine. Indeed, Kavenna might have said ...”

“... is your Grand Parc des Sources? Where are your salles de pulvérisation? And your first-class gargling-room? Have you no radioactive muds? We do not ask for dew-treading meadows, but what about a quiet garden with rows of brine-soaked hedges?’The hard truth is that Britons lost faith in the water cure – almost any form of water cure, internal or ...”

“... the 17th century, thanks to frequent encounters with Richelieu’s armies in the Thirty Years’ War, the duel established itself in the Holy Roman Empire. Later, German abolitionists liked to point out these foreign origins. The duel was ‘a chapter in the history of this pitiful German copying of French fashions’, wrote Georg von Below in 1896. From the ...”

“... Comenius ranks with Erasmus and the rebellion of Bogdan Chmielnicki is treated as seriously as the War of the Spanish Succession. And this is not just a matter of ‘restoring’ Eastern and East-Central Europe to the general story, the story itself becomes a quite different one. All those ‘European histories’ which are really self-congratulatory ...”

“... refuses to comment on their short-lived joint practice. The creation of James Stirling, world-class architect, the man who as much as Philip Johnson or Arata Isosaki invented the ‘signature building’ and who travelled the rewarding circuit of international big money prizes, lectures and juries from the 1960s onwards, is a very contemporary tale of ...”