“... which demands the expansive treatment Bair has given it. Beauvoir lived at the centre of post-war French intellectual ferment; in addition to her feminist and philosophical writings, she wrote six novels, four volumes of memoirs, and books on America, China, old age, sickness and death. As ‘Sainte Simone’, she became the mother of the modern women’s ...”

“... Friends. He was educated in Quaker boarding schools and was a conscientious objector during World War One. He spent periods in the Newcastle Guardroom and Wormwood Scrubs, where he almost certainly took some serious knockings-around. It is a subject he chose thereafter not to discuss. After prison Bunting settled for a time in London. He would be away from ...”

“... down after nearly three decades in power, but on the northern border with Saudi Arabia, the dirty war between Shia Houthi rebels and Salafists is getting nastier. In Libya, the oil companies are doing business again, but the country’s new rulers, swept to power by Nato, are talking about restoring Sharia law, perhaps even polygamy. In Bahrain, a peaceful ...”

“... force that came to grief in the Süntel hills. In East Germany before 1989, Verden was seen as a class conflict: Saxon aristocrats collaborated with the Franks: those beheaded were peasants. Becher, no Marxist, accepts that in the longer run the Frankish conquest ‘increased the social distance between the nobles and the rest’ of the Saxon population. As ...”

“... to Rome itself, to Polybius, Sallust, Livy and Plutarch; to Appian and Cassius Dio on the civil war; to Tacitus and the self-serving Josephus, sensibly changing sides in the course of the Jewish revolt in Palestine in 67-69 and surviving to write its history; and to Ammianus Marcellinus, an amiable pagan from Antioch, who was writing at the end of what ...”

“... will accept Mr Shaw’s view of what seemed to everybody else to be a calamity of first-class magnitude,’ Chesterton wrote of the fire in his history of the theatre, ‘for very great good has sprung from that mighty blaze.’ He hoped that the ‘dry rot’ that was ‘sapping our national sanity and virility’ would be cut out. ‘Now that ...”

“... Avricourt cemetery. But even after the Armistice, France wouldn’t allow the disinterment of its war dead. So in January 1919 Moïse engaged a local schoolteacher – for an unspecified sum – to exhume the coffin, presumably after dark, store it in his house, and arrange for its onward transportation to Paris. Moïse, McAuley writes, ‘was a consummate ...”

“... as much as eight ounces and were marked to show their nominal value. Only during the Second Punic War, which began in 218 Bc, did they begin to produce precious metal coinage in the manner of the Greeks. The first silver denarii appeared halfway through the war, in 211. Coins were struck in increasing quantities as the ...”

“... yet unexplained’.Buckley made his name as a campus activist. In the lead-up to the Second World War, Yale had been the birthplace of the America First Committee. Dedicated to keeping the British Empire on a short leash and America out of the war, but also to controlling the ‘virgin continent’ of Latin America, the ...”

“... the ‘two nations’ trope to describe the position of blacks and Asians as ghettoised, second-class citizens within British society. This theme was taken up in The Satanic Verses with its barely noticed championship of the Asian poor in ‘Mrs Torture’s’ London. Rushdie has described his novels as a ‘migrant’s-eye view of the world’, and his ...”

“... settlement was in flux, that England, like virtually all of Europe, was caught up in a major war, and that dynastic and party politics were peculiarly sharp and dangerous. It cannot be accidental that a disproportionate number of the couples Stone discusses from the 1680-1710 period – and indeed throughout these books – were Catholics and/or High ...”

“... of Edward Carpenter and Bertrand Russell, as well as of her early lover Otto Gross and other pre-war German thinkers and doers. Her performance as a mother must also be shown to be impeccable. Of course it is right to say that Lawrence behaved very badly about the children, though whether her leaving them was consistent with Frieda having no ‘reluctance ...”

“... 90s – gluttony, for instance. John Beresford, who edited the Diary just after the First World War, sees it all quite differently, and his Introduction and Notes are a period piece in themselves. For Beresford, the Norfolk parson was ‘that very rare and beautiful bird – a typical Englishman ... who loved his father and his family and his home with a ...”

“... a sort of friendship, but as a vast domain of democracy wherein we find gathered people of every class and race and creed, having in pipe or plug or cigar or cigarette, a bond of sympathetic understanding and a contact of common interest and good fellowship. I like to contemplate the business of producing and the pleasure of consuming this exalted plant as ...”

“... was no Casaubon in that respect – and Francis had to fend him off in ways appropriate to their class and period. A chilly initial submission; the speedy deployment of nervous disorders which made such things out of the question; a planned withdrawal to the South of France for much of the year – these were the stages of expediency, and for good measure ...”