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“... more. It offered the rosy prospect of ‘privatisation by occupation’. Whether or not existing French and Russian contracts with the Baathist state would be honoured was of less consequence to the oil supermajors than the prospect of a neo-liberal assault, led by Rumsfeld and Cheney, on Iraq’s nationalised oil industry, a staple of all Third World ...”

“... Welcome to the world of post-modern politics. This scenario (or something like it) is laid out by Philip Bobbitt in the course of describing three possible futures for the world we now inhabit, one characterised by what Bobbitt calls the transition from a ‘nation-state’ to a ‘market-state’ model of politics and society. The nation-state is the model ...”

“... was a personal disaster in 1521, when he was thirty. In a bold but impractical move during the French invasion of northern Spain, he nerved the little Spanish garrison in the citadel of Pamplona to defy the vastly superior army surrounding it. In the resulting fight, he was badly wounded by a French cannonball, and in ...”

“... or for the blessed-in-waiting, was depicted by Bosch or Zurbarán with orgasmic sadism. As Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris note in Standard Operating Procedure, Christian iconography places at its centre an implement of torture and, in the stigmata, offers an all too human scourge with which to flay flesh raw. Of course, millions of Christians and ...”

“... owed his international reputation to the two great volumes on the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II which he published in 1949, and to his trilogy on the material civilisation of world capitalism, which appeared between 1967 and 1979. He died a few months before the first volumes of his incomplete final work came out in 1986. More local in topic, and ...”

“... with a capital ‘R’, means Calvinist. The historian of the Jews in England was Cecil Roth, not Philip. Stephen Gosson never became a Catholic monk. Michel de Castelnau, the French ambassador, did not ‘trust’ that Elizabeth could be assassinated, and his secretary, Courcelles, did not become an English mole. (I ...”

“... of the war, when it liberated the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Germany. As he knew some French and German, Hecht was asked to interview the survivors. He told Philip Hoy, who has edited his Collected Poems (Knopf, £42), that ‘the place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For ...”

“... point I learned that Solaris hadn’t been translated directly into English, but from a Polish-to-French translation, with a result Lem described as ‘drastic’ – a beautiful irony for a book that takes as its subject the impossibility of meaningful contact between alien species. Perhaps I should wonder: had I read Lem at all?Anyhow, Lem was ...”

“... few physical details. Logan Pearsall Smith called him ‘the Rembrandt of English prose’. In his French Revolution, his private letters, and elsewhere, he dashes off one vignette after another. Fred Kaplan quotes one of the less well-known of these cameo portraits, depicting the French historian Thiers: ‘a noticeable ...”

“... lacks an adversarial Enlightenment and its culmination in a violent democratic revolution. The French Revolution unleashed a reactionary critique of secret societies. Augustin de Barruel’s widely translated Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme (1797) traced a triad of conspiracies – of philosophes, Freemasons and Illuminati – which ...”

“... without at the same time feeling obliged to deliver embarrassing lectures to the Germans and the French – of all people – about how their economies could become as productive as the British. Whatever Mr Blair might think about the leaders of Old Labour, at least they had no such illusions about the capacities of the average British businessman. To make ...”

“... to depict himself, deprecatingly, as the slightly above average product of a lycée-trained, French upper-middle-class background ‘that might have been used to illustrate the theses of Pierre Bourdieu’. Despite this insightful modesty, he assumes his readers share precisely this background and its code of sentiments, including its delicate political ...”

“... of Titian’s friend and public-relations manager, Pietro Aretino, and his greatest patron, King Philip of Spain, are rich in revealing detail and seem, by contrast, fully rounded. No reliable record survives of the way Titian conducted himself in the company of friends, let alone in private. The Ferrarese ambassador in 1522 claims that the artist is ...”

“... was struck by the contradiction. In the early 1990s, Germans were taking up flamenco lessons. The French-Gitano band Gipsy Kings was hitting the top of the charts with tracks such as ‘Bamboléo’. It was plausible, Bogdal writes, that their ‘lively, upbeat songs might have been playing at festive barbeques in Rostock’ while the asylum reception centre ...”

“... his own party as oppressors of Ireland or India, or as feeble fellow-travellers with the French Revolution. All of these things he did; but the ‘great melody’ – of whose historical reality there is no doubt – is certainly to be heard in the Reflections on the Revolution in France, and O’Brien has not taken enough account of recent work (I ...”