“... your defeats are only a success the less. In this unequal struggle, our good fortune is not to be losers; and your misfortune, not to be gainers.’ In 1783, the year after the novel appeared, Laclos wrote a manifesto, left unpublished until the 20th century, which called on women to effect a radical transformation of ...”

“... the British military establishment and the new government in Washington, a town presided over by another John/Jack the lad. Profumo’s go-getting reputation and unstuffy demeanour made him attractive to the men around JFK, who liked that he didn’t seem like a typical Brit, never mind a typical Tory. He was extremely sociable, and well suited to the ...”

“... That production dates from 1755, the year before Gillray was born. His father, a blacksmith by trade, had served in the army for a decade and lost his right arm in 1745 in a battle against the French at Fontenoy. Reference to this mutilation, a perpetual reminder of the horrors of war, would show up sometimes overtly but also ...”

“... workers’. The first issue of Partisan Review, which appeared in February 1934, was produced by the New York branch of the JRC. ‘Through our specific literary medium,’ the editors wrote,we shall participate in the struggle of the workers and sincere intellectuals against imperialist war, fascism, national and racial oppression, and for the abolition ...”

“... it was all schoolboy high jinks. Given that this was the late 1970s, it is unlikely anyone will be able to prove anything. But we do know where Farage went politically at the end of the 1980s when he decided he could no longer vote Conservative. In the 1989 elections to the European Parliament Farage cast around for a party that sufficiently reflected his ...”

“... for concern in the case of Guantánamo are clear enough. The assertion that the US was not bound by any law with respect to the indefinite detention of foreign nationals not surprisingly had a powerful effect. Guantánamo symbolised the primacy of power over law in a way that threatened not only the hapless detainees, but every other country in the world. It ...”

“... the Large Hadron Collider, the new particle accelerator near Geneva. Revved up to enormous speeds by supercooled magnets, the protons raced around the LHC’s huge ring, 27 kilometres in circumference. They criss-crossed the French-Swiss border more than ten thousand times a second before smashing into each other, releasing primordial fireworks. Huddled with ...”

“... Europe? Scholars and writers tend to claim transformational status for the war they happen to be writing about, as Paul Fussell did for the Great War – which was also declared exceptional by those who thought of it as the war to end all wars. War is always modernising. The increasing use of unmanned drones ...”

“... Sadat of Egypt with a copy of The Guide for the Perplexed, composed in Egypt in the 12th century by the Jewish scholar Maimonides. Navon remarked on the book’s language – it was written in Arabic, but in Hebrew script – and stressed the kinship between Hebrew and Arabic, while Sadat spoke of the long history of co-operation between Arabs and Jews, and ...”

“... written in exile in Denmark in the 1930s, Brecht wrote: ‘In the dark times/Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing/About the dark times.’ His life was shaped by these dark times. He came of age during the First World War, became a successful writer in the ...”

“... awash with more private wealth than ever before, but their police forces remained weak, at least by modern standards. Communications were slow and unreliable, and only the most rudimentary means existed for tracking individual malefactors. Especially in remote towns, a determined band might carry out a brazen robbery, and it would ...”

“... with his wife, Jessica, he founded a progressive school in the San Fernando Valley; later he would be a steady presence in the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War. And always, he was cast in roles of a strange consistency that suited nobody else: violent men, defeated and wilful; men who were hard ...”

“... the collapse of the venerable retailer BHS in 2015 and his recent naming in the House of Lords by the Labour peer Peter Hain as a ‘powerful businessman using non-disclosure agreements and substantial payments to conceal the truth about serious and repeated sexual harassment, racist abuse and bullying’, Philip Green gave a self-congratulatory interview ...”

“... leaving the EU was that it might reinvigorate and liberate national politics, stifled for too long by the absence of real choice at election time. The EU is a legalistic and treaty-based political institution designed to take some of the heat out of domestic politics. That left people complaining that the EU was generating all the heat. Brexit offered the ...”

“... the period, and it may he that the message is as well. For the poet’s death was shortly followed by a critical work, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1974), which placed him at the head of the ‘Men of 1914’, and chronicled in elegiac terms his lifelong struggle to reanimate a moribund literary culture. Brown shifts the emphasis from Pound Era to Group ...”