“... of Mossad’s first targeted killing squad. Emerging later from the shadows to enter politics, he rose through the ranks of Likud, becoming foreign minister in 1980 and prime minister three years later. When Shamir met the UN official Brian Urquhart for the first time, he greeted him warmly. ‘I am so happy to meet you,’ he said. ‘I have never dealt with ...”

“... under his eyes: Alain Chartier, for instance – that the genre was learning, in post-Agincourt France, to depict the ‘despair’ which Huizinga (in accord with his poets) makes its dominant mood. The list of charges is easily extended, through the subjects Huizinga touches but whose subtleties he ignores because he wrote too soon: was old age more ...”

“... forced to retreat, leaving the wounded to their fate in the burning fields. Sharon subsequently rose to prominence as head of the notorious ‘101’ unit which carried out reprisals for every border crossing – whether by fedayeen or Arab civilians. On several occasions, according to Benziman, he gave orders for attacks on civilians. He encouraged ...”

“... and abroad. He read voraciously in several languages: multi-volume histories of Rome, Britain, France and other Empires, as well as Euripides and Shakespeare, long passages of which he could quote from memory. A man of action who loved the limelight, he could also be notably discreet, so that his international network of friends made possible a series of ...”

“... some 7 per cent – a structural predominance of the Right far greater than in Britain, let alone France. Even at the height of its success in 1972, the SPD could secure a margin of no more than 0.9 per cent over the CDU/CSU. This year, for the first time ever, the SPD was well ahead of its rival, scoring 5.7 per cent more than the CDU/CSU. This is a historic ...”

“... programme of the exhibition included a range of sports that were popular in late 19th-century France: motor races and ballooning, fishing and pigeon racing, as well as mass displays featuring thousands of gymnasts and archers, golf and polo parties, school sports, events for women and children, and – least Olympic of all – professionals competing in ...”

“... philosophical and more French. He devised an elaborate stratagem to get Voltaire expelled from France so that he would move to Berlin and take charge of his cultural revolution, but the scheme misfired, and Voltaire ended up for a while as official historian to the French court. Friedrich then turned to another French superstar, the mathematician Pierre ...”

“... to Hitler – and all the more so as his foreign policy grew more aggressive and risky. As in France and to a lesser extent in Britain, the colossal loss of life in the First World War still haunted the German public. But Hitler knew how to manipulate that fear. Each time Germany seemed to be steering towards the brink of war – the reoccupation of the ...”

“... year he became the co-founder and majority shareholder of the literary magazine Mercure de France, which provided an outlet for his prolific output. His commercial breakthrough came in 1892 when he published L’Ecornifleur (‘The Scrounger’), which recounts the story of a parasitical man of letters. A number of novels, many of them with ...”

“... was the all-round professionalism and esprit honed by constant conflict all over 11th-century France. For more than a century this fighting style carried almost all before it, until in 1187, in Palestine, the opposition began to get its act together. Crouch’s book tells the story of William’s family, one of the two Norman families that made ...”

“... In France, we do it lying down,’ a French minister is reported to have said on first seeing the tango. He was not far wrong. The tango crystallised at the end of the 19th century in the brothels of Buenos Aires. It was a dance of prostitutes and pimps, and in its ineluctable rhythms, its belly-to-belly stance, its interlacing of legs, it reflected their professional concerns ...”

“... the French Prophets. This millenarian group, founded by Camisard refugees escaping persecution in France, had at its heart a number of divinely inspired prophets. When Lacy first encountered them, he found them telling of a ‘glorious Dispensation, touching the Vocation of the Jews, the Conversion of all Nations, the Destruction of Antichrist, an universal ...”

“... her decks. Within minutes the liner listed to starboard and her bow started to sink. As the stern rose in the water, four great propellers could be clearly discerned. Then she was gone. George Henderson was only six at the time. ‘I can still sit here now,’ he told a TV crew in 1994, ‘and see that great liner just sliding below the waves.’ The ...”

“... social democracy and the welfare state were to be at their peak’. Trade union membership rose to its maximum point; inequality reached its lowest. Edgerton even debunks the 1979 Winter of Discontent which is supposed to have propelled Thatcher to power. Almost 30 million working days were lost by strikes that year – but 20.7 million of them were ...”

“... randomly taken, and mocked by grandiloquent chapter titles (‘A Star is Born’, ‘Mighty Like a Rose’). The sequence records her birth inter faeces (her mother has taken an ill-timed overdose of salts); her ungrateful father, desperate for a ‘laddie’, names her after the passing milkman’s horse; the narrative jumps seven years to the heroine’s ...”