“... involved there in the first place. The military supply flights that Kouchner and his co-workers took from Gabon to Biafra often carried arms: their mission was less neutral than it appeared. The conflict might have felt genocidal to its victims, but it would more accurately be seen as a particularly brutal civil war. As Péan views it, the ‘Biafran ...”

“... you can’t bring yourself to love it. It’s a position that has its advocates. A few years ago, John Mueller’s Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to al-Qaida urged a relaxed attitude: far more has been spent on nuclear weapons than can be justified by any sensible political strategy; they aren’t of much military use; their proliferation ...”

“... conditions that Zweig – who had recently moved to Salzburg – be rigorously excluded. (Zweig took to absenting himself from Salzburg every summer while the festival was on.) Hofmannsthal’s friend Leopold von Andrian put himself through a Zweig novella (that same Confusion I mentioned earlier) ‘reluctantly, a spoonful a day, like a nasty-tasting ...”

“... are mad, quite mad. But they smiled benignly and were amused. After this, group conversations took place. Playing musical chairs with the Nazis (and letting them win) seems almost too perfect an image for the particular brand of appeasement Astor and her ‘Cliveden set’ embraced. Cliveden in Buckinghamshire had been given to Nancy and her husband ...”

“... chaplain, Someone fell madly in love with him.’ Eventually, Yossarian the Assyrian bombardier took the role of Someone and eight years later, after an extended gestation about the length of James Joyce’s for Ulysses, Heller published the novel which set the standard he chased for the rest of his life. To the bold query why he never published another ...”

“... the tradition of Albert Camus’. In every review, it is dutifully reported that Moulessehoul took his feminine nom de plume to avoid military censorship, and that he lives ‘in exile’ in southern France. The impression given is that Khadra is a dissident, rather than a staunch defender of the Algerian army, an institution that bears considerable ...”

“... painter, came from Puerto Rico. After high school in Switzerland and New York City, Williams took a degree in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Hilda Doolittle (later H.D.) and Pound. In 1912, after a difficult two-year courtship, he married the shy and practical Florence (Flossie) Herman. During the same years he established a ...”

“... nuclear deterrent), were thought to be unpopular, and its changes were accepted by John Smith when he succeeded Kinnock as leader after the 1992 election. Smith was not a member of the soft left, however; nor did he anticipate New Labour. The party he led was still recognisably in the British social-democratic tradition; still one in which the ...”

“... was a tough-minded drive to find mechanical explanations. When England’s greatest living poet, John Milton, wanted to explain why we are as we are, he retold the ancient story of Adam’s sin and consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. When Alexander Pope wrote his Essay on Man in the following century he took care ...”

“... best stories come in Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron by the adventurer Edward John Trelawny, and so are a bit too good to be quite true, but they are evidence of the way Shelley came across. Trelawny’s account of Shelley’s attempt to learn how to swim in a deep pool in the Arno catches the thing very well:He doffed his jacket and ...”

“... British imperial experience. He didn’t need to mount a conscious defence of empire; he took it for granted. When he graduated from Oxford in 1884 and sought political instruction, his cousin, a former viceroy of India, arranged for him to work for his second cousin, Evelyn Baring, consul-general of Egypt. Grey’s perspective was ...”

“... named for the segregated air base in Alabama where they trained, broke the colour bar. But it took them two years – far longer than white aviators – to be deployed to Europe. There, the white head of their combat group, convinced that Blacks lacked the capacity for aerial warfare, at first kept them hundreds of miles from the battle zone. But the ...”

“... had tamed the discretionary Keynesian monster. As Blinder sees it, this is baloney. When Volcker took over the Fed, the monetarists’ stable relationship between money and economic activity was nowhere to be found. He did not generate the anti-inflationary recession of the early 1980s through a vigilant targeting of money growth, which proved to be both a ...”

“... Nazis, as was the case in most branches of the federal bureaucracy. Its first president, Otto John, had been active in the resistance, escaping to London after the failed putsch of 1944. In 1954 he popped up in East Berlin and revealed in a press conference that the soon-to-be West German Ministry of Defence and the foreign intelligence service that was ...”

“... So we were fed with Swedish folk music, Italian arias, French chansons, German schmaltz and John Philip Sousa. Not so bad actually, because if you put all that together, it becomes what you can hear – well, some of it – on Abba records.To this hodgepodge, known as schlager in its mass-produced pop form, Abba added the Anglo-American songbook ...”