“... were pledged to obstruct the war effort. Among other things, they used to go about in the black-out attaching ‘sticky back’ notices to lamp-posts, telephone kiosks and so on. The notices informed passers-by that the war was a Jews’ war. Parties of illicit bill-stickers would emerge in pairs from Anna Wolkoff’s flat, all of them thoroughly au ...”

“... Prey do Beckmesser in an otherwise dreary Meistersinger at the Met. Rather than the neurotic, black-suited Shylock figure regularly trundled out, someone who barks more often than he sings, Prey’s Beckmesser was a pouty, vaguely adolescent, and extremely vulnerable middle-aged man, his insecure learning as a shield for his sexual uncertainties. But the ...”

“... made fixed festivals. But few other holidays entered the calendar to make up for the many red and black-letter days (major and minor feasts respectively) that had been stripped from the old year. The week, by contrast, dominated and ordered life. Calvin had rejected the idea that Christians were obliged to rest on the Sabbath. In New England, by ...”

“... room of the club, Stephen said, pointing with two fingers at a table across from us: ‘There’s Benjamin Britten.’ Against the light from the window, I saw a man with dense curly grey hair talking with someone at his table. Stephen kept looking toward him, but Britten never looked our way. As we were leaving the club, Stephen said, having, it ...”

“... and immaterialised – by its surroundings.) Once upon​ a time, in the good old days of Walter Benjamin, I thought of writing a book called Paul Cézanne, A Portrait Painter in the Era of High Positivism. Its question would have been: How do human beings offer themselves to ‘portrayal’ in a culture where they understand themselves, and expect others to ...”

“... of the USS Ranger. He had argued with senior officers in Boston, but in France found an ally in Benjamin Franklin, the American commissioner in Paris, and a womaniser unfazed by Jones’s own sexual profligacy. In April 1778, Jones sailed the Ranger from Brest, intending to harry British ships on the Atlantic coast. Two weeks later he seized and burned ...”

“... l’Homme to be returned to Algeria; he also commissioned another investigation, by the historian Benjamin Stora, into disputes (intra-French and bilateral) over the late colonial period in Algeria and France’s undeclared war against the independence movement.Most of Macron’s interventions concede a point of principle in parts of the world where, in ...”

“... the university’s pre-eminent academic college. Under a series of progressive masters, including Benjamin Jowett, Balliol adopted aspects of the new, relatively meritocratic and non-denominational culture of professionalism that was reshaping Victorian British elites, and encouraged many of its best students to take public exams in the recently established ...”

“... the conflicts of the present. The anti-racist movements of the last decade, culminating with Black Lives Matter, have focused on raising awareness of colonial history, including the importance of slavery, empire and settler colonialism in the development of European capitalism. Thanks to this, it is no longer surprising to hear the origins of National ...”

“... Four: no longer buttoned up inside matching suits, but individually tailored in tasteful shades of black, brown, beige and grey, hair midway between moptop and Maharishi, out in the open air pretending to play and – maybe with a little help from a sneaky lunchtime joint – enjoying the pose. They only had to open their mouths to reveal their ...”

“... in which the malarial mosquitoes breed. For many years I have treasured a quotation from Walter Benjamin which may have helped spawn the character of Arnow or, more likely, contributed something further to a figure already compounded of many memories and unconscious sources: ‘The slightest carelessness in the digging of a ditch or the buttressing of a ...”

“... rebel and friendly pamphleteering rival of Defoe’s – described how two brothers, William and Benjamin Hewling, who had fought at Sedgemoor, fled by sea but ‘were driven back again, and with the hazard of their lives got on shore (over dangerous rocks), where they saw the country filled with soldiers, and they being unwilling to fall into the hands of ...”

“... the vision it had when it came to power – that were manifestly failing those citizens, mainly black, who were most socially vulnerable. In fact, the writing had been on the wall for Calata since February 2014, when, following Zuma’s annual state of the nation address, he was grabbed by the scruff of his jacket by SABC’s head of news, Jimi ...”

“... become a founding member of the secret, ultra-nationalist organisation Union or Death, a.k.a. the Black Hand. In 1913, he became head of the intelligence section of the Serbian general staff, a job that put him in a position to arrange to smuggle the weapons and ‘the boys’, as Clark calls them (Gavrilo Princip who fired the fatal shots, was a month shy of ...”

“... that the sampled other gets out of all this.There is a whole forest of ghosts here, corralled from Black music and worship. Eno’s original musical epiphany – the track that ‘blew my socks off’ – was Steve Reich’s ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ (1965), in which Reich sampled and looped a Pentecostal street preacher called Brother Walter. Eno had also been ...”