“... 1944 of a Benelux Customs Union. It continued with the creation of the Council of Europe in 1949; took wings with the Schuman Plan of 1950, which gave birth to the European Coal and Steel Community the following year; and expanded with the Treaty of Rome into the Common Market of 1957, creating a European Economic Community which by the end of the 1980s had ...”

“... a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan Review’s theatre reviewer. Lines of succession make for neat narratives and it’s fun to fantasise a Margo Channing-Eve Harrington face-off, but Susan Sontag wasn’t the new Mary McCarthy, any more than ...”

“... and provided a shelter for weeds, vermin and insects’. The major drawback, however, was that it took an Osage orange hedge three or four years to grow to its full height.In time the burgeoning rail network would provide the solution. Wood was already being shipped from the East in vast quantities to be used for house building, and the railways themselves ...”

“... Sabra and Shatila is perfectly clear on Israeli responsibility for, and even complicity with, what took place: I refer here to the Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk’s powerfully concise and brilliant book, Sabra et Chatila: Enquête sur un Massacre, which has still found no established British or American publisher. Facts do not at all speak for ...”

“... and will continue to be, inevitable. The first of these topics is guilty pleas. The Commission took the view that there is nothing wrong in principle with encouraging a defendant who has committed the offence with which he or she is charged to plead guilty. The decision should only be taken with legal advice after the prosecution case has been fully ...”

“... And Horace Walpole christened her the Morning Post, after a Private Eye of the time. She took as her second husband the rogue politician Charles Townshend, who seems to have married her for money and influence, and to have gone in fear of her female will. According to J. Steven Watson’s Preface – one of two excellent introductory pieces, the ...”

“... also joined the Fabians, encouraged by Hugh Dalton, the postwar Labour chancellor. He took it seriously, did a lot of reading, especially about the Webbs’ Minority Report on Poor Law reform, and in the summer of 1910, at the end of his year as president of the Cambridge society, he and Dudley Ward toured the West Country in a caravan, speaking ...”

“... eclecticism’ weren’t Europeans, but Orientals; they were the ones who took the fullest intellectual and artistic advantage not only of the advent of Europe but of the fact of the ‘Orient’, the ‘correction’ and ‘expansion’ of ‘the old humanism of the Mediterranean basin’. It’s in this context that I want to situate ...”

“... who answered ‘no, probably not’ presumably exercised some hermeneutic charity and took that answer to indicate a lack of certainty about hell’s existence rather than any uncertainty about their own beliefs.) Unfortunately, those who had already answered positively the question about ‘heaven’ were not then asked: ‘So what do you think ...”

“... appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to ...”

“... forces were importing the same fuel for $1.57 a gallon. Halliburton’s chairman, David Lesar, who took over from Dick Cheney in July 2000, robustly defended his firm. But Waxman raised another question: if Halliburton was being allowed to rip off the Iraqi people, was the Bush administration allowing it to milk the US government as well? Waxman’s committee ...”

“... since before the war, was shocked at ‘his face … unimaginably creased and craggy’: ‘it took me some time to rediscover the young face I had known beneath this new mask. Then the two merged and after that I always saw him with a kind of double vision.’ Auden’s admirers have often been drawn to think about him in terms of double vision: some of ...”

“... says he has no memory of such a meeting.) The defining drama of Netanyahu’s life as a young man took place in July 1976, when Yoni was killed at Entebbe airport, during a mission to rescue Israeli and Jewish hostages from Air France Flight 139, which had been hijacked by four members of a German cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The ...”

“... chief priorities of Corbyn’s Labour Party were neatly captured in two speeches made by John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor and often the project’s most eloquent spokesman. In 2016 he declared that Labour members would ‘no longer have to whisper’ the word ‘socialism’: the party would no longer be ashamed of its values. And in the dying ...”

“... Professor’s House prepares the ground for the later novel, sweeping the path as John the Baptist did for the one to come. In both books, male relationships are the pure and primary ones. The Professor’s House centres on the memories of an ageing historian, Napoleon Godfrey St Peter, and much of the book – the entire middle section, in ...”