“... by vintage green Fords. Having kept old cars and dresses in good repair for decades of el bloqueo may at last prove a moneymaker. The island is preparing its return to the ‘US sphere’. And perhaps painting and photograph have more in common, judged strictly as responses to history, than most of us would like to believe. De Kooning’s caricature of ...”

“... though rendered ironic by the inadequacy of the protagonists. However ‘typical’ Emma may or may not be, the patterns of behaviour she is trapped in are recognisably similar to her creator’s. Flaubert had to make life difficult for himself. After the triumph of Madame Bovary, he was determined not to be seen ...”

“... bosses dined early with their families in ersatz châteaux and the legendary jazz scene – Truman may have heard Charlie Parker live – was a middle-class affair found in labour union halls rather than bordellos. Two Irish gangs, the Goats and the Rabbits, fought for control of the city. Tom Pendergast, the cunning, sickly boss of the Goats, ran his ...”

“... Cameroon a ‘mini-Africa’. The insurgency dragged on until 1971 when the last of the leaders, Ernest Ouandié, was publicly executed. It seems that Ouandié had been on the run for days, hiding in banana plantations and under bridges. Exhausted and disoriented, he asked a passerby for help. The man recognised him and led him towards a nearby ...”

“... Assistant Lecturer in Classics at Birmingham University he made lifelong friends of E.R. Dodds and Ernest Stahl, but evidently had mixed feelings about teaching and perhaps about provincial living: ‘Qu’allais-je faire dans cette galère?’ He was not the first Protestant Ulsterman to seem frugal of speech and déraciné. Perhaps his difficulties were ...”

“... Philip Carteret Webb. The Jewish Naturalisation Act (the ‘Jew Bill’) was finally passed in May 1753, but during the general election of the following year it became a focus for City, High Church and Tory opposition. ‘Here, for the first time in English history,’ Dr Alderman writes, ‘the spectre was raised, and the possibility (however remote or ...”

“... about booming and book wars. ‘So,’ Ford remarks, ‘if one can keep oneself out of it, one may present a picture of a sort of world and time.’ He never did keep himself out of the picture, of course, and never meant to. The autobiography in Return to Yesterday often amounts to little more than local colour. Ford ...”

“... complaints about European free-riders. Others attribute its origins to the persuasive powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its ...”

“... the Declaration was plainly contradictory, with its promise that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’ This had been carefully worded. ‘Civil and religious rights’ weren’t the same as ...”

“... innocent white slaves: they were the women the law deemed worth saving.When Detective Inspector Ernest Anderson brought Harvey into the Great Marlborough Street police station on 9 July 1910, it was clear that she was a promising victim, respectable enough to help bring the ‘ruffians’ to justice. She was young, Protestant, sexually inexperienced and ...”

“... are all possibilities. The only known reader of the new work is Salinger’s son, Matthew, but he may have been joined by Salinger’s widow, Colleen, and possibly by his literary agent and by a few editors at Little, Brown, the publisher of the original four books. Or maybe not; maybe at this stage it stops with the widow and the son, or even just the ...”

“... issues. They agree that US quasi-imperial supremacy is a ‘bubble’, a semblance that may have overawed the globe during a period of disoriented transition, but never derived from American military or economic power alone. It depended on the absence or indifference of the US’s earlier foes, Russia and China, plus the collusion of its former ...”

“... in ‘standing up to Communism’ was never uncritical, and could seldom be taken for granted. Ernest Bevin, as foreign secretary, could match the Americans in apocalyptic language, warning after the 1948 Communist takeover in Prague of ‘the collapse of organised society over great stretches of the globe’. But neither he nor Clement Attlee would have ...”

“... Saint-Simonian beliefs about gender complementarity (although rather mystical) and celibacy may have shaped her adult distrust of heterosexual norms. Bonheur was also introduced by her father to the writings of Félicité de Lamennais, nicknamed ‘Robespierre in a surplice’, a radical Catholic democrat who was formally condemned by the ...”

“... it is not just another facet of reality, however clamorous and incorrigible that reality may sometimes feel. Miss Didion, however, has come out. She stands revealed, in The White Album, as a human being who has managed to gouge another book out of herself, rather than as a writer who gets her living done on the side, or between the lines. The result ...”