“... by its neighbours, when it was ceded by Madrid in 1975 to Morocco and Mauritania. Morocco took a good and profitable slice of the north – phosphates were the main economic enticement – and Mauritania, the poorer neighbour abutting the south, took the rest. Spanish Sahara, in other words, was never properly ...”

“... near Cardiff. Howe’s final report had been submitted in September 1968, a month before Crossman took up his new portfolio. The Ministry had by then spent six months arguing that Howe’s explosive eighty thousand words should remain confidential; only a brief summary would be published. ‘Not on your life,’ Howe had said, according to Crossman’s ...”

“... by showing that Genet was attracted almost exclusively to heterosexual men. In the Seventies he took almost no interest in gay liberation, which he no doubt perceived as a white, middle-class movement, a matter of French domestic politics, at a time when his sole commitment was to the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. To add the final insult, he insisted ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... where he stowed them behind some bins. News International security guards retrieved them and took them to Wapping while detectives searched the flat. The security guards then returned the bags to the car park, stashing them behind the bins along with a pizza. One of the guards, borrowing from Where Eagles Dare, texted his colleague: ‘Broadsword to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and a largely Kurdish part where the YPG is strong. When IS attacked the Arab district the US took no action. But as soon as IS moved to attack the Kurdish districts, US air raids were launched. Many analysts saw this strategy as flawed. They argued that IS should be seen as the greater evil, and that Assad’s forces should be assisted if that was what ...”

“... of delusion that prevents the masses from rising up in revolution. All were raised in what they took to be gilded cages in a hostile society; in his essay ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, Benjamin described the Jews in his neighbourhood as living ‘in a posture compounded of self-satisfaction and resentment that turned it into something like a ghetto held on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... inferior and the incurably insecure. Kissinger belongs more to the second category. It took him a while to nerve himself, but having experienced the thrill of ordering and administering murder he was unable to get his fill of it. He grew sleek and satisfied, and more confident. He began to chafe at the status of number two. He began to slather his ...”

“... others have covered it adequately, but he is not short of material, having had access to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library (where Hadley’s letters, alas without Ernest’s thousandfold replies, are stored) and many other major collections; indeed all the biographers appear to have been received with unusual generosity by the Hemingway family and the ...”

“... but even here his illuminating suggestions must be weighed against the distinguished essay by John Creaser in the Lindley volume which points, heretically and convincingly, to the ‘royalism’ of Comus, or at least of the occasion for which it was written. The radicals were apparently against ‘authoritarianism’ – but who was more authoritarian ...”