“... and the Resistance movements in the Conseil National de la Résistance, which met in Paris on 27 May 1943. The following month he was arrested near Lyon, where he had organised another Resistance meeting. No one knows exactly how or when Moulin died – he was last seen semi-comatose after a horrific beating at Montluc prison; indeed, it isn’t certain that ...”

“... straight, but by dint of breathing and sighing all round and round it, to arouse in the reader who may have had a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn’t!) the illusion of a solid object, made (like the ‘ghost’ at the Polytechnic) wholly out of impalpable materials, air, and the prismatic interferences of light, ingeniously focused by ...”

“... am the Fellow with the great belly, and he my Dogge.’ No one now quite follows this joke, which may be an airy reference (to distract attention) to the Man in the Moon. What is more interesting than Falstaff’s ancient joke is his capacity to make us listen to him while he tells it. We concentrate.Falstaff can get away with this debate as to who ...”

“... counsellor and a bureaucrat of the old school. Henry had remained loyal to Henry Tudor throughout Richard III’s reign, despite starvation and torture; despite, according to legend, being interrogated by Richard himself. ‘Thou servest for moonshine in the water a beggarly fugitive,’ ...”

“... Taverner’, thus seems to have kept a pub in Ipswich, while his great-great-grandson, Richard Duke of Suffolk, nicknamed ‘Blanche Rose’, was accepted as King of England – but, alas, only by the French, and only till he was killed in battle at Pavia. There is an irony, on which Derek Pearsall ends his book, in the extirpation of the Chaucer ...”

“... healthy place – morally or physically. If the whores didn’t get you, infections did – which may explain why it gained so many hospitals in the mid-19th century. In 1854, Dr John Snow advanced the cause of public health – and epidemiology – by persuading the local Board of Guardians to remove the handle from the Broad Street (now Broadwick ...”

“... intent. A manila envelope made in and posted from a Manila recently under the control of Marcos may contain an explosive device, particularly if the cover of the book it ostensibly contains has a savage Nicholas Garland illustration of a wild horseman wielding a bloody scimitar, surrounded by the decapitated victims of his havoc. If the poems of Manila ...”

“... Charles Doyle’s biography of Richard Aldington opens so readily at the 24 excellent photographs with which the book is illustrated that the temptation to look at them, before one gets involved with the text, is irresistible. The series starts with a rather determined-looking boy with cap and striped jersey, holding a football ...”

“... Frenchmen in the light of what was to come. In this respect, he diverges from Heinrich Böll, who may be the most humane and painfully merciful of Catholic novelists but who is also a pitiless judge when it comes to evil. But evil is not a category for Richard Cobb. He recognises naughtiness and ...”

“... of Selfhood’, that we no longer need a distinction between morality and prudence, one may seem to be encouraging immorality.* By way of defence, I shall argue here that these distinctions between absolutism and relativism, rationality and irrationality, morality and expediency, are obsolete and clumsy tools – remnants of a vocabulary which we ...”

“... relevance.) It is, truly, an amazing story. At the end of the 11th century a European army, which may originally have numbered no more than thirty-five thousand, and which was much reduced by battle, disease and defection, nevertheless contrived to take Jerusalem. Of the various Crusader states that they founded in ‘Outremer’, some lasted nearly two ...”

“... Back in the Sixties, before he became the bad boy of American philosophy, Richard Rorty struck his colleagues as a safe and promising young man. His first book, published in 1967, was an anthology of Essays in Philosophical Method designed to document the reorientations in analytic philosophy that followed Rudolf Carnap’s move from Germany to the US in 1935 ...”

“... to murder, and numerous counts of arson, kidnapping and assault. Haggarty was released in May 2018, after four months’ imprisonment. Leahy picks out the case of Denis Donaldson, a member of Sinn Féin who was recruited as an informer by the RUC Special Branch. He was arrested in 2002 by the PSNI (which had replaced the RUC the year before) for ...”

“... Etymology doesn’t help us much here. Ennui is French but it is related to annoy, and spree may come from Old Norse, or it may actually be French, an elision of esprit. The OED merely murmurs about the word’s ‘obscure origin’. Still, whatever their derivation, the words do seem to belong to quite different ...”

“... could I emote?Using Shakespeare to emote has been one of the constants of Pacino’s life and may well have been more important to him than cinema. Marlon Brando (his co-star in The Godfather) apparently once said that he would make the ideal Shylock. ‘How Marlon saw that in me, I’ll never know,’ Pacino notes in his memoir, Sonny Boy, skilfully ...”