“... 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 ...”

“... from Medieval times. Wood End, Moat farm, East End farm, Boxhedge House, Eyreswood farm, Broad Green farm, Perry Hill farm – all had moats, and some of these remained up to a few years ago. The Parish Survey records in 1722 the ‘Messuage in Cranfield built by Dr William Aspin, with the moat round it and groves of trees adjoining’. There is no clear ...”

“... dictatorship thus became the lynchpin of US strategy in the region, which is why Washington green-lighted Bhutto’s execution and turned a blind eye to the country’s nuclear programme. The US wanted a stable Pakistan whatever the cost. As we now know, plans (a ‘bear-trap’, in the words of the US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski) were ...”

“... returned to Tunis with his wife, Marie-Germaine Dubach, a Catholic from Alsace, and their son Daniel. He began teaching at the Lycée Carnot and established a centre for educational research. In 1953 he published The Pillar of Salt, which launched a revolution in French literature from North Africa, soon followed by the novels of Driss Chraïbi in Morocco ...”

“... at the group closely in 1997, after some of them contributed to Against Nature, the notorious anti-Green television documentary; over the years he has called them ‘industry lobbyists’, ‘a bizarre and cultish network’, ‘an obscure and cranky sect’. ‘Invasion of the Entryists’, originally published in the Guardian in 2003 but better read in the ...”

“... more often than not, dull. Sir Mortimer Wheeler probably started the rot and then there was Glyn Daniel and his bow ties and today it’s Tony Robinson capering about professing huge excitement because of the uncovering of the (entirely predictable) foundations of a Benedictine priory at Coventry. His enthusiasm is anything but infectious and almost ...”

“... The others are barely out of their teens, with pinched faces and hunched shoulders, their thin green beanies pulled down over their ears. They mutter an appeal – presumably forced – to Zelensky to let them go home, but their words are lost in the wind, obliging the Wagner social media team to add subtitles. The whole video is barely a minute long.In ...”

“... conning a family friend in a drug deal, he employs as his partner a former schoolfriend, Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), from whom he had drifted apart after Johnny joined a gang of skinhead racists. While they busy themselves disavowing their cultural obligations and falling in love, all around them is chaos – Omar’s uncle’s mistress is poisoned by his ...”

“... Security Council responsible for covert operations, had given the CIA station in Léopoldville the green light and wired Devlin $100,000 to finish the job.Kennedy’s​ arrival in the White House signalled a shift in American foreign policy. As a senator he had been critical of France’s undeclared war in Algeria. Now he shocked the Washington establishment ...”

“... court. He had just been elected to the Académie française, but had not yet had time to don the green and gold, grip his sword and be received among the Immortals.But well before the end he had begun to express misgivings. Certainly, Gaullism and Communism were for all practical purposes extinct. The Socialist Party had abandoned its absurd ...”

“... malnutrition and increasing numbers of children reported as risking their lives to slip across the Green Line to become beggars inside Israel? At the end of Yellow Wind, Grossman asked one ‘last question’ which could just as well serve as a coda to the essays collected here: ‘Is the feeling that the situation cannot possibly continue for ever any ...”

“... writhing in the throes of a midlife crisis and sexual combat (‘What do [women] want? They eat green salad and drink human blood’), composes feverish letters to current lovers and dead philosophers – was a landmark moment in the power-lifting of Jewish-American fiction. ‘Over the past ten or 15 years,’ Julian Moynihan announced in the New York ...”

“... out her avoidance of the question of slums. In an era when, according to her later collaborator Daniel Seligman, 17 million Americans lived in dwellings that were ‘beyond rehabilitation – decayed, dirty, rat-infested, without decent heat or light or plumbing’ – Izvestia had a point, however desirable those slums may have looked by comparison with ...”

“... and the poem is filled with images of questionable military might: Deep from protruding chests in green-gold medals dressed, planned to command and terrorise the rest The poems Bishop wrote between her arrival in Key West in 1938 and her move to Brazil more than a decade later are laced with images of violence and warfare. ‘Florida’ begins as though she ...”