“... be made use of in ways that are contextually effective, and surprisingly original. That is what David Piper contrived to do in a brilliant one-off war novel, Trial by Battle. It describes the experiences of a young officer, the reverse of professional, during the 1941 Malayan campaign between the British-Indian Army and the Japanese: the campaign which led ...”

“... And it has not only been comparatively small, it has also been relatively safe. Unlike Russia or France or Austria or Germany, there have been no pogroms, no show trials, no outbreaks of orchestrated anti-semitism, no final solutions. Ever since Anglo-Jewry’s return to Britain on the eve of the Restoration, its history has been one of sustained economic ...”

“... Samuel Johnson also was worrying that English speakers were starting ‘to babble a dialect of France’. Incorporation of foreign words into a language can be a sign of its lack of vocabulary (Cicero thought Latin needed to borrow from Greek), of its commitment to cosmopolitanism (Schleiermacher advanced a version of this argument), or just a matter of ...”

“... Victor Considerant as a solution to the social and economic instabilities of post-revolutionary France: a settlement house or estate for 1620 people organised around a street gallery that ran the full length of the second floor. This public thoroughfare was the only way to get from one domestic interior to another, or to gain access to an array of ...”

“... of enjoyment and sexuality evident in the church art of so many other countries, in Spain and France and Britain, and in the Buddhist East where I once saw a wayside shrine in the hills east of Kandy which imaged the afterlife as a thorn-tree up which sinners climbed for so many thousand years (the rates per sin were displayed in a cave temple ...”

“... but the lairds Traill and Burroughs and the factor Scarth. In the ‘England and France’ chapter of his extended autobiography, Muir, explaining his differences with the Marxist poets of the Thirties, allows that they ‘knew a great deal about the present (which we did not)’. And he ends the chapter staying briefly on Damsay and harking ...”

“... delayed as long as possible. Hinzpeter strongly advised that Wilhelm travel – spend some time in France or even America, then live in England for a year. But the prince went off to study in Bonn, like his father and Coburg grandfather, where he joined a duelling fraternity, mixed with officers of the King’s Hussars stationed in the town, and found himself ...”

“... protests were overshadowed by those across the Channel and on the other side of the Atlantic (in France and America they occupied great universities: here, students took over colleges of art). The FBI put Ayers and Dohrn at the top of its ‘most wanted’ lists; in Germany, the violent actions, trials and suicides of the RAF leaders dominated and defined ...”

“... similarities from zone to zone, and that we can use one fear to illuminate another. In this novel David is a white American of uncertain sexual allegiance, more or less engaged to a girl called Hella. David falls in love with Giovanni, a barman in a gay bar in Paris. This love is vivid, captivating, the real coup de ...”

“... charismatic, if vain and irascible author, the text also sheds tantalising light on 12th-century France. Most of its details can be corroborated by other sources, so its veracity is hard to challenge. Heloise, despite her avowed lack of vocation, soon became abbess of her own monastery. Abelard has nothing but praise for his former wife (mutual monastic vows ...”

“... to the contrary. ‘The category “the West” does not seem to be in Donald Trump’s head,’ David Brooks wrote at the start of Trump’s second term. In The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, Alexander Karp, the head of Palantir, writes that ‘the West’ is ‘a concept that has been discarded by many, almost ...”

“... invention of powered flight is so familiar that it’s easy to think we know all about it. David McCullough’s excellent biography The Wright Brothers brings the story back to life with facts that the non-specialist either doesn’t know or has blotted out with a misplaced broad brush. Yeah yeah, we get it: the brothers were provincial tinkerers who ...”

“... over his life and over his conduct as a leader of the Revolution, and what is soon evident about David Lawday’s spirited and highly readable biography is that he stands Danton in a flattering light and pays insufficient attention to movements in the shadows. ‘The Gentle Giant of Terror’, the subtitle calls him: which suggests, along with revolutionary ...”

“... and they form the main part of quite a different selection, Lettres d’ Amérique, published in France in 1984. Broadly speaking, they fall into the following categories: Gripping social correspondence of the ‘Thank you for your letter,’ ‘the weather is gorgeous,’ ‘Ivan must be a big boy now,’ ‘love to the doggies’ kind. Personal or legal ...”

“... David Jones was staying in the Chelsea flat of the BBC’s Assistant Director of Programme Planning, Harman Grisewood, as the bombs fell on London in the autumn of 1940. During one raid, a near miss blew a bus off course; it went through the window of Sainsbury’s on the King’s Road. ‘I was going out to see if I could do anything,’ Grisewood reported ...”