“... British soldiers, French veterans from Algeria and Belgian mercenaries were recruited by Colonel David Stirling’s company, Watchguard International Ltd, for operations behind enemy lines. In the South too the nationalists were divided, with Cairo backing the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen (FLOSY) and more radical groups congregating under the ...”

“... I didn’t know I had. A native of the southern region of Telemark, my friend had come north as a young man and it may be that he saw in me the same fatal attraction to the north that he had experienced. He had also caught sight of something else in me, something dangerous. One day, it was early September and the last of my visit, we were on one of our ...”

“... quotes the half-drunken Leskov as having said: ‘Thee I anoint with oil, even as Samuel anointed David … You must write.’ Like so much else in Chekhov’s work, his relation to religion is ambiguous. In a letter to Diaghilev a year before his death, he wrote: ‘I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.’ But while ...”

“... Middle Ages,’ she observed, ‘powerful men have covered their throats.’ The anthropologist David Givens, coiner of the important term ‘neck dimple’ for the area concealed by the tie, saw the moment of the exposed male throat as a true paradigm shift. ‘In the old days of just a few years ago, you had to look powerful in business. But now ...”

“... her quick wit, but he compensates with a trademark hairdo like no other on Japanese screens. As a young man, he had long, straight black hair, but the Koizumi of recent years sports a permanent-waved, steel-grey mane covering his ears and tumbling down to his collar, the inspiration of Teruo Nakagomi, a trendy hair stylist in his constituency. Koizumi ...”

“... he was better than his circumstances had made him. After Cambridge, he did what many intelligent young men without money would do, and became a clergyman, eased into modest preferment by influential relatives. Another uncle, Jaques Sterne, an affluent and worldly churchman, with whom he would later quarrel, was a considerable help in the early years. But ...”

“... mother was not Hildegard was hardly coincidental. Supported by ‘a very large number of nobles young as well as old’, the rebel son planned to kill his father and Hildegard’s sons. When Charlemagne had crushed the revolt, he held a big assembly of ‘Franks and other faithful ones’ at Regensburg, Tassilo’s former capital, where death sentences were ...”

“... he wrote to Michel Strauss, a student at Harvard: Hungary is a very romantic cause; all sorts of young men want to go there and die for liberty, although plainly they cannot be of any use now that the Russians have crushed the resistance. But they very properly feel that something must be done, that awful things are happening, that one cannot be supine, and ...”

“... Basaglia’s roots were in Venice, his background bourgeois, his sympathies anti-fascist. As a young man in December 1944 he was arrested and held in harsh prison conditions by the occupying Nazis until their expulsion from the city the following April. He studied medicine in Padua, where he specialised in mental and nervous diseases but read widely in ...”

“... the Communist Party (the Jewish Arab List) and MKs associated with Zionist parties, especially David Ben Gurion’s Labour. He looks at wedding songs to trace the different streams of Palestinian political behaviour. He finds informers who snitched on their neighbours and on people they saw in the village shop or on the city bus; who reported things they ...”

“... political upheavals of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015 and the resignation of David Cameron the following summer. (Theresa May initially hoped to refocus on ‘JAMs’ – Just About Managing families – but lost all ideological confidence along with her parliamentary majority in June last year.) The phrase was used as a way of signalling ...”

“... be defined by the Baby Boomers versus the students [and] mainstream parties will need to get these young voters on side if they are to survive.’ ‘Dave … tells me that I should join his political unit. I groan and say: “Oh God, don’t ask me to do that – I wouldn’t be able to say no.”’ He doesn’t. The Cameron Tories were really, it seems, as ...”

“... Edward​ Long arrived ‘home’ in the ‘mother country’ in 1769 with his wife and three young children after 12 years as a planter in Jamaica. His return presented no problems. He was a colonist, a ‘freeborn Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright ...”

“... the early 1990s: Foucault, she said, had been deported because of his homosexual activities with young students. I still have no idea which version is correct. At the time of the Paris seminar, he told me he had just returned from a sojourn in Iran as a special envoy of Corriere della sera. ‘Very exciting, very strange, crazy,’ I recall him saying about ...”

“... disparaged the culture of gift-giving on which that influence seemed to rely. The diplomat David Urquhart’s neurosis about Russian influence at Constantinople derived from his failure to persuade Ottoman officials to accept his proposals for a free-trade treaty; his Eurocentric perspective led him to smell a Russian plot. Britain used its naval power ...”