“... small attacks, but the local population was, Ludewig suggests, mostly quiet – an attitude that may well have been prompted by the massacre of villagers at Oradour-sur-Glane by Waffen-SS soldiers a few weeks before. Model, on the other hand, had to watch German forces squeeze along the few remaining roads near Falaise, abandoning most of their equipment ...”

“... or two feeble excuses for his hostility to the study of post-Chaucerian English at Oxford. Lord David Cecil’s ‘gentlemanly and rather old-fashioned scholarship’ is duly noted, but ‘this is not to disparage Lord David’s accomplishments, either as critic or biographer.’ Why not? Even Empson’s expulsion from ...”

“... difference. On her deathbed, she bequeathed her letters to the British Museum, ‘that the world may know he loved me once’. There’s an element of revenge in Nayder’s treatment of Dickens. ‘This book forces him to the margins,’ she says. The problem is that Catherine is such an unwilling ally in her project. After her marriage, she seems to have ...”

“... have suspected it, but in Lloyd George’s lifetime it was never publicly exposed. Margaret and David Lloyd George continued to share houses, holidays, family cares and political duties; and Stevenson’s competence at her job (not to mention the fact that she looked, as John Campbell notes, ‘too prim to be anything so improper as a mistress’) warded ...”

“... In May 2001, the French National Assembly passed a law, the Loi Taubira (named after Christiane Taubira, the Socialist deputy who sponsored the bill), recognising the Atlantic slave trade as a ‘crime against humanity’. France is, as a result, the only country in the world that has condemned slavery in the name of human rights ...”

“... witnesses. A local curate called them ‘poor needy fellows of small or noe credit & such as … may be easily drawne to depose an untruth’. Tanner, meanwhile, was recast as a man who ‘well performed his worke with care’ and ‘such a one as is to be beleved upon his oath’. Alexandra Shepard has created a historical framework to help us grasp the ...”

“... with diagrams of blocks needed for an architectural project. Others were on pieces of paper which may have been preserved because they also contained notes, fragments of poems or drafts of letters, for example. Such drawings can be seen in New York, together with an outstanding selection of the small group of highly finished sheets that he made as gifts for a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... earned him the wrath of Israel’s supporters, who were particularly angry with him for quoting David Ben-Gurion as saying:Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does it matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come ...”

“... are today elegant, pleasant, quiet places to live; Robin Hood Gardens, however controversial it may still be, is indisputably preferable to the serried yuppiedromes being prepared for the site; and buildings by both from the 1970s have been listed. Their strange, disguised self-flagellation appears wholly unjustified. Their guide, though it seldom revises ...”

“... Life of an Ordinary Man, the posthumous memoir pieced together by the publisher and journalist David Rosenthal. His source material was a series of interviews Newman recorded with the screenwriter Stewart Stern between 1986 and 1991, along with ‘oral histories’ of Newman by his contemporaries. In her foreword, Newman’s daughter Melissa says he wanted ...”

“... diaries are by tradition kept in the office of the present chief at Century House, Lambeth. It may be that, like some of his predecessors, Mr Curwen (who can expect his knighthood within the year) uses the diaries to entertain visitors with their colourful details of Cumming’s pre-First World War disguises. These disguises, however, are not to be taken ...”

“... after birth, some could stay there for decades, even for the rest of my life. These foetal cells may even sense the tissues around them and develop into the same types of cell, becoming an integral part of my body, which may have both positive and negative effects on my health – a sort of backwards inheritance. Foetal ...”

“... too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the Sussex countryside, still swimming occasional lengths of his pool in the altogether and attending the first nights of the three ...”

“... a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. (According to a Defense Department consultant, US intelligence has long known ...”