“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... clandestine eroticism come into the open, in a carnival of the damned. A convict called Broadway Rose put on a sex show, and the prison’s ‘boy-girls’ offered their services in cells covered by red curtains. In Himes’s ‘To What Red Hell’, it’s the fire that enables this liberation of desire, before extinguishing it: ‘Oh, Lawd, ma man’s ...”

“... one of Joyce’s collaborators, Michael Sonenscher, looks at the compagnonnages of 18th-century France. Journeymen in various trades practised a non-Christian ceremony of initiation into a devoir. The men concerned had overlapping skills concerned with building, furniture, leather. ‘The emergence of the compagnonnages – and their relative ubiquity ...”

“... which remains his most widely performed piece, was born of a different catastrophe: the fall of France in 1940. Mobilised as a stretcher-bearer a year earlier, Messiaen was captured by German soldiers in the woods near Nancy, and interned at Stalag VIIIA in Görlitz, Silesia. The conditions – the cold, the meagre rations – were gruelling, but a Catholic ...”

“... his lectern.The message worked well (some said too well) and Johnson’s own satisfaction ratings rose sharply after he was admitted to hospital with Covid-19. In mid-April, two-thirds of respondents said they were confident the government would provide accurate information about the pandemic. But public trust soon declined. By the start of June, only half of ...”

“... is a price you must pay for some victory over and above Pearse And Connolly and the ‘right rose tree’. It is, as he said, also ‘liable to bias’. The Queen at the wall in Ireland was not entirely unlike Willy Brandt at the Ghetto memorial. Whether ‘the ultimate reality must be anarchy’ who can presume to say? ‘Tradition is ...”

“... apart. And it had to do this with a Security Council divided among a hostile Soviet Union and France, a reluctant Britain, and a United States that viewed the entire enterprise through the spectacles of the Cold War. Ultimately the intervention can be said to have succeeded. A united Zaire (of a kind) did eventually emerge. But there was a universal ...”

“... of Art in London (where he fell in with David Hockney). His success was immediate and Ossie rose like froth to superstar dressmaker status in the Sixties London stylocracy. Ossie’s set, Lady H. explains included some of the most fascinating people of the era. Cecil Beaton entertained Ossie and Mick Jagger at his house ... Jagger invited Ossie to stay ...”

“... to a permanent presentation. But don’t expect to see anytime soon a display on how New York City rose to commercial prominence by financing and transporting the products of slave labour. This national desire to forget slavery stands in stark contrast to historians’ preoccupation with the subject – an example of the well-known disconnection between the ...”

“... simmering, which gells now one way, now another. Certainly graphic revolutions do occur, as in France in the eighth century and Byzantium in the ninth: in each case a new calligraphic script (for copying books) was deliberately created from the old cursive script (for writing documents), to serve the needs of a cultural revival. But Latin documentary ...”