“... of 1949 was designed to challenge the ‘false doctrines’ of communism in the Third World. John F. Kennedy set up the US Agency for International Aid in 1961 and in 1971 USAID was joined by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (which was absorbed into the Development Finance Corporation in 2019). In the eye of this hurricane of acronyms, two ...”

“... wars, the eruption of 1794 was, at least from a cartoonist’s point of view, fortuitous.John Brewer’s large and somewhat rambling survey of the cultural significance of Vesuvius begins with an attempt to draw a single thread from this tangled story. He starts with a visitors’ book, now in the Harvard library, which covers the period from ...”

“... climbing the cliff roads. This was the first contact on the mainland, and although the SRS finally took Bagnara, a defining characteristic of the campaign had emerged: the topography favoured defenders on the high ground, and consequently the conventional 3:1 manpower ratio required for military victories needed to be higher.Confirmation came six days later at ...”

“... Rampling, Paul Oakenfold, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway, who in 1987 went on holiday to Ibiza, took Ecstasy under the stars at the open-air club Amnesia, and watched DJ Alfredo play an unusually eclectic mix of pop, new wave, disco and US house as the sun came up. They came back to London and started their own parties, kickstarting the ‘second summer of ...”

“... League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx ...”

“... in his filial loyalty. An early test of parliamentary allegiance arose in 1769 after the outlawed John Wilkes returned to London to contest the seat of the City of London and his supporters were fired on by soldiers. Fox, still on good terms with North and his ministers, spoke against Wilkes in the Commons, where his chief antagonist was Burke. Burke told the ...”

“... enjoyed its biggest success with an 11-day rebellion in London in spring 2019. Tens of thousands took part in this prolonged disruption. A large pink boat was wheeled to the junction of Oxford Street and Regent Street; activists glued themselves to the hull, as they did to the London Stock Exchange and the Treasury; Waterloo Bridge was blocked. By the end of ...”

“... made it past the frontier. His passeur Lazare Cabrero, a Spanish republican, shot him in the head, took his money and buried his body. A decade later, the corpse was discovered and Cabrero arrested. At the trial, he claimed that Jacques had broken his ankle, leaving him no choice: his orders were to kill the seriously wounded rather than abandon them in the ...”

“... events in France began to match his apocalyptic forebodings, and even when, in 1792 and 1793, Pitt took counter-seditious measures in England and entered into armed conflict with France. Mitchell comments that at the end of the period covered by this volume, ‘as Burke withdrew to the seclusion of Beaconsfield in 1794, he had to recognise that his massive ...”

“... day rue. Monarchs showed their teeth in the Renaissance. Assaults by Tudor governments on Oxford took the form of periodic purgings of heterodox faculty, the requirement of subscription by laymen to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and the substitution of oligarchic constitutions in college and university for the more democratic Medieval ...”

“... at Mahoney when she brings coffee in on a serving tray, but otherwise ignore her. Mike Nichols and John Hersey win grudging approval – the former for giving her a nice tip, the latter for his kindly, slightly alcoholic smile (‘He had the look of a person who understood other people, who wanted to hear what they had to say’). Joseph Alsop, making chitchat ...”

“... young wives, or Esther Summer-son-style dependent relatives, were equally ignorant when they first took up their duties of household management. But they at least had a copy of the book; they read it; and they were the normal conduit by which the knowledge in it reached their employees. There was an educational potential here, both of self and of others, which ...”

“... the propaganda and makes a fair and sensible speech on the Middle East – such as Governor John Connally in 1980 – is taught a sharp lesson. Jewish Americans make up only 2.7 per cent of the population of the United States, but partly because of their concentration in some pivotal states and mainly because of their influence on the American media and ...”

“... from an unpublished journal by Robert Pinget, one of the few Beckett disciples to whom she took a liking. On 6 August 1960, he pays a visit to hand back to Sam the ms. [of Comment c’est] he’d given me three days before to read. I was dreading having to give my opinion. The text is so difficult that it requires several rereadings. I had no right to ...”

“... who spouts off.’ He paused. ‘That’s not to say we’re not a militant union. Last year we took more industrial action than all the other TUC unions put together. I’ve had more than thirty years overseeing industrial action. But the aim of the action has got to be a show of power in order to reach an agreement. It’s not going to change the ...”