“... science. At 9 a.m. the Russian army reaches Ravensbrück. The assault on the Reichstag continues. Martin Bormann has a hangover. At 11.30 a.m. Churchill sets fire to his bedjacket with his cigar. At 1 p.m. Hitler has his last meal: spaghetti and a cabbage and raisin salad. The barrage of unsifted information is all quite riveting, in its slightly sick-making ...”

“... Buddhism in modern Japan is undoubtedly big business, although there is no sign of a Japanese Martin Luther waiting in the wings to denounce abuses. The main focus of criticism should, however, be the doctors who grow rich by promoting a type of birth control which, to say the least, is far from optimal. LaFleur’s fascinating book shows how two major ...”

“... to Albert Kapr’s biography, Johann Gutenberg: The Man and the Invention, translated by Douglas Martin, a source Morrison acknowledges.The novel is the story of a man who fails at life – passing up on love, friendship, wealth and happiness (salvation would have been a more authentic aspiration, but then this is a 21st-century novel) – while coming up ...”

“... the Social Democrats. They help keep her in the centre of the centre.Merkel’s main challenger, Martin Schulz of the SPD, still seems buoyant – though at this point it appears more likely he will take his place in a future Merkel ministry than become her successor. There was a brief moment earlier this year when the SPD drummed up ‘...”

“... Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin trace the origins, rise and decline of a mostly misunderstood political movement. Angela Davis, who was an ally of the Panthers and a member of the Communist Party, complains that she is better remembered as a 1970s fashion icon, known for her large ...”

“... Jim Crow laws by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Leading the protests was Martin Luther King. In the aftermath of the Montgomery bus boycott, King established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, using black churches as the base for organising protests. During the 1955-65 period, what historians call the ‘classic phase’ of ...”

“... agency or another. In Dead Lions, Diana Taverner, head of operations at the Park (Kristin Scott Thomas on the telly), says to a subordinate: ‘I sometimes worry you’re going over to the enemy.’ He looks ‘shocked’ and replies: ‘MI6?’ She says she means her boss at MI5. It’s a joke, but it’s funny because it’s true. The exchange is echoed ...”

“... diary in January 1939 that they were ‘nicely settled in a charming hotel on the promenade of Cap Martin ... the beautiful blue sea under my window and oranges and lemons growing along the streets’. She described the distractions of the resort, in particular the casinos, and her ‘great difficulty’ in stopping ‘my husband in trying to break the ...”

“... deeper, older layers. The researchers – Lieven Verdonck, Alessandro Launaro, Frank Vermeulen and Martin Millett – began their GPR survey in 2015, and published preliminary results in the journal Antiquity last month: ‘an overview of the full plan, alongside a more detailed case study of one sample area’, as well as a thorough account of their methods ...”

“... and would like something to counterbalance this. I would like to read about St Francis and St Thomas Aquinas,’ he wrote in his early twenties. He showed an early talent for art, and was sent to the Slade through the benevolence of a local Lady Bountiful. He emerged from it in 1912, an almost dwarfish figure a couple of inches over five feet and weighing ...”

“... In​ The World Is Flat, published in 2005, Thomas Friedman argued that global trade and finance, presided over by international institutions – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO – were making the planet not only richer but less hierarchical and unequal. This was a pumped-up version of the Enlightenment theory of doux commerce, which held that growing trade, founded on mutually beneficial contracts and the rule of law, would provide opportunity and riches for all, and eventually consign wars, empires and great-power politics to the past ...”

“... and rancour. There is evidence that he enjoys walking, curlews, turtledoves, bullfinches, owls, Thomas Moore’s ‘Thee, Thee, Only Thee’ and much that France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my ...”

“... ideology is closer to their Neo-Confucian forebears. The defector Hwang Jang-yop told Bradley Martin that the two Kims ‘turned Stalinism and Marxism-Leninism on their heads by reverting to Confucian notions’. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a picture emerged of Kim Il Sung in a Soviet uniform with a medal on his lapel. Like Ho Chi Minh, he ...”

“... of Roger Williams (the founder of Providence, Rhode Island), takes in memorials to Brigham Young, Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton, and ends at the grave of Thomas Jefferson – has a distinctly antiquarian flavour. Ruthven believes that myths ‘become plausible when canonised by ...”

“... of which one is reminded by both Mordecai Richler’s anthology and Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer’s collection of essays. There’s the fact, among many other examples, that US air bases on Japanese territory, acquired at the end of the Second World War, were used against Vietnam. There is the durability of Central European anti-semitism. And ...”