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“... Israel’s destruction of Palestine. The campaign (which has been quite successful in Germany and France) was launched after the reinvasion of the West Bank three years ago, after the devastation of Jenin (which capitulated, to the great pride of the Israeli army, on Holocaust Day 2002). The language that pro-Israelis and representatives of Israel use to ...”

“... served as usual with French bread, warm croissant, café au lait and Fort Dauphin’s speciality, rose-pink papaya. The terrace is set about with hibiscus and orchids. A ten-foot poinsettia tree holds both cream-coloured and scarlet flowers over my head. In front of me spreads the great fan of a Traveller’s Palm, symbol of Madagascar. Wendy, my colleague ...”

“... pseudonym of Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim), Ludovico Muratori and Lorenzo Ganganelli, who rose to the papacy as Clement XIV, advocated a more reticent and demythologised Catholicism, which turned away from baroque militancy and vacated the political space more properly belonging to the sovereign state. In Atheism in ...”

“... the Nicene Creed, which in its English version contains the sentence ‘On the third day, [Jesus] rose again, according to the Scriptures.’ That sounds on a modern reading like a clear statement of unmediated supernatural revelation: a story of a supernatural event, described in sacred books, the Gospels of the New Testament. That is not what the text ...”

“... the Maoists. In 1990, riding the wave of democracy that had swept through Eastern Europe, Nepal rose up once more against the autocracy in a movement led by the Nepali Congress and a coalition of leftist parties that included the Maoists, but was dominated by the party that went on to become the UML. A constitution was swiftly promulgated, turning the ...”

“... a year in a labour camp before Czernowitz came under Soviet control again in 1943. He moved to France in 1948 and settled in Paris, where he continued to write poetry in his native German. In 1970 he drowned himself in the Seine. Celan was not literally a poet of the epitaph, but there is a sense in which his poems, with their stress on negation, their ...”

“... if not Ronald Reagan. Hoping to reclaim the prodigal for the theatre, the Broadway producer Billy Rose addressed an open letter to him: ‘Listen, Thunder-in-the-Mountains, isn’t it about time you made up your mind whether you’re Senator Pepper, D.W. Griffith or Kupperman the quiz kid?’ He did undertake theatrical projects after this, notably a ...”

“... hungrily at the words like a dog at pieces of raw meat’. Eventually he rose to his feet and launched into a long, ranting monologue, all the while thwacking his boot with the riding whip. Franckenstein’s servants rushed in, thinking that their employer was being attacked. After Hitler had said his piece and left, there was a long ...”

“... with him, charged with the intention to ‘corrupt and debauch’ her. Colonel Forbes fled to France, and a £50 reward was offered for information leading to his arrest, together with a description: ‘about 64 years of age, five feet nine or ten high, florid complexion, stout made, grey hair, thick bushy whiskers, which he sometimes dyes, walks very ...”

“... at risk of famine, and 900,000 children were at critical risk. As the cost of a 25 kg bag of wheat rose to $415, there were stories of Palestinians eating grass. People I spoke to who had left Gaza told me that their relatives were going without food for days on end.As the situation deteriorated, there were reports of looting. Israel has repeatedly blamed this ...”

“... antidote, a large irony given Wodehouse’s career after being captured by the Germans in France (where he’d been living when war broke out) as a colleague of Joyce’s on the German side. A good part of Joyce’s appeal lay in an on-air personality that projected a dangerous sense of fun: ‘And where is the Ark Royal?’ he would regularly ...”

“... two possible novels, asynchronous with one another and orientated on opposite geographical axes (France-America, England-Australia), but each wholly or partly inspired by the expedition of a French nobleman: in the first case, Tocqueville, in the second, Freycinet. Perhaps it was the French connection that suggested to Carey the idea of folding the novels ...”

“... of a votive cult among bebop obsessives. Soon after his blurry end, aged 34, a fond graffito rose and sprouted all over New York: Bird Lives! Parker’s sad extinction released myriad afterlives: musical colossus, modernist exemplar, contested emblem of racial politics, finally even the recipient of the paste crown of a posthumous Hollywood ...”

“... of three referendums which challenged the grand designs of Brussels have been ignored – in France and the Netherlands in 2005, in Greece in 2015 – and three have led to a second vote: Denmark in 1993; Ireland in 2002 and 2009.) Mediapart likes to stress the undemocratic nature of the EU: ‘stolen from its citizens’ by ‘the markets’, ‘finance ...”

“... a massive undertaking’. As an intellectual dignitary, he was guaranteed a warm reception in France when The Patagonian Hare was published three years ago by Gallimard; Philippe Sollers called it a ‘metaphysical event’. It’s an unbridled piece of self-celebration, dictated to his assistant editor at Les Temps modernes in what Lanzmann calls his ...”