“... was relieved, peasants like Perrin Bordebure moved into deserted villages such as La Cicogne, took them over, raised families, and bred the population back to its earlier and ‘natural’ mark around twenty million. The period 1450-1550 was accordingly one of growth and relative ease for the peasant classes. By 1550 this was over, and France had moved ...”

“... has narrowed its meaning since Shakespeare wrote the Bastard’s great speech about it in King John, where it meant greed, self-interest, the opening bars of capitalism. Adshead’s book belongs to a recently growing genus of works on the history of particular commodities. To be of most value a study of this kind should be a part of general history, joined ...”

“... that march, another handsome man in a leather coat came to the place where they were resting and took all the young children away. Pearl supposed the children were killed until a few months ago, when she saw a documentary on television about Raoul Wallenberg and recognised him as the man in the leather coat. ‘I screamed when I saw a picture of him. Those ...”

“... to kindle his innate intelligence. Shortly after becoming heir to the Melbourne title in 1805, he took the unstable Caroline Ponsonby as wife – or, more accurately, she took him as husband. From the beginning, he seemed henpecked: on the occasion of his first big Parliamentary speech in 1806, she visited the Commons ...”

“... out of it. From the 1860s to 1880s, a period of policy-driven famines on the subcontinent, he took on the monumental task of using the colonial state’s own statistics, published in its annual reports on Moral and Material Progress, to prove the ‘drain theory’ of British rule in India, challenging official claims of imperial benevolence and making a ...”

“... has a lovely founding legend. In 1899 Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo’s Imperial University took leave from his post as professor of chemistry to study in Leipzig, where the best researchers could be found. He found other things in Germany too. They included cheese, tomatoes, asparagus and meat. For 1200 years meat had been banned in Japan – and, try ...”

“... the biographies, the inexplicable determination of Kenneth Branagh (of Shackleton) to out-act John Mills (of Scott of the Antarctic), the retellings of modern legends about the explorers freezing and dying and writing poetry as they did so. But Tromsø is almost empty. There seem to be hardly any tourists, though I am told by a smiling woman in the ...”

“... was a hallmark of the drifter, those who set out on an intentional journey by the new method took to carrying a suitcase instead. The term ‘automobile panhandling’ was used for a while before it was replaced in the 1920s by ‘hitchhiking’. The origins of the word are disputed. It may have built on ‘auto-hiker’, hobo slang for this new type of ...”

“... and Eurocentric perspective’ date from the first half of the last century. Set against, say, John Elliott’s concept of a ‘multiple monarchy’ (Elliott is absent even from Kamen’s bibliography which, given his enormous influence, is difficult to account for) or Serge Gruzinski’s writings on mestisaje (also absent) which depict the Empire as not ...”

“... Pasteur in Paris with Simone-Henriette-Charlotte Kaminker (later the actress Simone Signoret) and took a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne. At 24 he joined the Resistance with the Communist Francs-Tireurs, who sent him to the US to train as a parachutist. In 1947, he joined the journal Esprit, where he met Resnais and André Bazin. He ...”

“... vignettes of just such occasions are sprinkled: photos of the old man (with his donkey), who took the whole family off to his house and plied them with endless coffee, delicious local hooch and loads of fruit for the kids. It is easy to forget that the Greeks are not, and could not possibly be, on any objective calibration, more hospitable than any other ...”

“... to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century city. As for Gangs of New York’s ...”

“... a photograph of his parents, Nina and Semyon, seated across a restaurant table from whoever took the picture (presumably Shteyngart). Nina – the book is dedicated to his analyst, so let’s look first at his mother – has a coquettish tilt of the head, cropped hair and a tight-lipped, sly smile. She sits in front of an empty plate and a glass of ...”

“... edition supplied them with their front-page stories. Columnists across the political spectrum took their tone from the Telegraph’s style of half-ribald, half-sanctimonious indignation. Some MPs even tried to out-Telegraph the Telegraph in their expressions of penitential shock at the excesses they were encouraged to indulge in by the House of Commons ...”

“... radar, the B-2 also operated undetected by the American people, who were oblivious to when bombers took off, where they went, or what they did. The new American way of war did not require the participation or even the active support of Americans, merely their acquiescence. This was by design: excluding the people increased the latitude exercised by officials ...”