“... letters could not fail to supply welcome sidelights on the history of their times. During the Franco-Prussian War Laura and Paul Lafargue reported to Marx from Paris a curious atmosphere of unreality. ‘The beauties of the Boulevards are impatiently awaiting the invaders’; the workers seemed apathetic, and several ...”

“... were bought any time anyone from the family went to Dublin. My sister became addicted to Jean-Paul Sartre. I remember a book called Words which began ‘I loathe my childhood’; this was an astonishing idea in Enniscorthy at that time. Not long afterwards another sister decided to build a house. There were no architects in Enniscorthy, but lots of ...”

“... scientific, social and literary thought during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Paul Weindling’s Health, Race and German Politics documents how many of these same ideas contributed to the nightmare of Nazi Germany. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection set much of the context for the general discourse on degeneracy. At ...”

“... on the floor.I knew that the captain of the Bonhomme Richard had been a Scotsman called John Paul Jones: I had once passed through Kirkbean, the Kirkcudbrightshire village where he was born. And I was vaguely aware that Jones had been involved in a daring raid on Whitehaven in Cumbria, although – since he was said to be the father of the US navy – I ...”

“... Communist Vote Is a Vote against God’). Portraits made by the leftist photojournalists Franco Pinna, Ando Gilardi and Arturo Zavattini (Cesare’s son) on ethnographic expeditions to Basilicata – Town Witch, Ritual Keener, Dying Healer – illuminate Christ Stopped at Eboli. So does the sequence of photographs entitled A Woman Possessed, and the ...”

“... him an inscribed copy of Chroniques and a gold medal depicting Napoleon and Marie Louise), was pro-Franco, and willing to curry favour with the Nazis if it meant he could go on performing in Germany. It is alarming to read on practically the last page of this book that Craft was trying to limit access to a proposed Stravinsky archive at UCLA in case evidence ...”

“... stoical insouciance of people who’d remained. The administration on the run was now headed by Paul Reynaud, a maverick conservative whose Churchillian instincts were never likely to prevail. Reynaud declared Paris an open city, but it was of no consequence for the many who’d already left and those who were scrambling out at the last minute. Hanna ...”

“... cosmopolitanism of the times; Europe was still pretty new; people sighed, did they but know it, in Franco-Bohemian (or Franco-Moravian), in German (very strangely), in Norwegian. What you got out of these writers, like the wrong kind of leaf, or the wrong kind of snow (though these were native productions), was the wrong ...”

“... Heart, she studied writing and embroidery, and discovered French and English novels: Ivanhoe, Paul et Virginie, Corinne. In 1870, she married a Louisiana cotton factor, Oscar Chopin, and set out for a grand honeymoon tour of Europe. But the Franco-Prussian War cramped the Chopins’ style; they left Paris as the city ...”

“... who rejects his parents’ faith in quiet diligence and joins a black power group. In Franco Rosso’s Babylon (1980), a father can’t wait to kick his dreadlocked interloper of a son out of the house. Steve McQueen’s film series Small Axe, broadcast on the BBC in November and December, complicates and enriches this schema. In the third ...”

“... full retreat, and on 10 June the government abandoned Paris, initially for Tours. Six days later, Paul Reynaud resigned as prime minister and passed the leadership to Pétain. Jackson describes with verve the chaos that followed the departure from Paris, as ministers scattered to various châteaux, most of them lacking telephones. At the Château de ...”

“... earlier in the year and decided on a honeymoon in Europe. In Catalonia, a matter of weeks after Franco’s military uprising against the Second Spanish Republic, they settled happily into a political climate of intrigue and rivalry among the variegated species of anti-Fascists who failed, in the end, to hold the pass: bourgeois democrats and left ...”

“... dead – has strongly Catholic roots. But the main point of the essay is simply that John Paul II entirely deserved the historic come-uppance he received in Managua. The Pope, characteristically enough, went out of his way to declare his special affection for Cardinal Obando, who has been tougher in his opposition to the Sandinistas than he ever was ...”

“... nor the exhibition has much to say. The show doesn’t dodge the difficult questions. Both Paul Celan’s Death Fugue and Kiefer’s work feature here as ways of remembering the 12 years of Nazi rule, but there are other, more prosaic objects too. The concentration camps are represented by a replica of a gate at Buchenwald, inscribed not with the usual ...”

“... green patchwork quilt of fields corrugated by ploughing reminded me of the irregular hatchings in Paul Klee’s notebooks. These were his attempt to explain what it might mean to speak of the freedom of the ‘active’ line in art. ‘The primordial movement, the agent,’ Klee wrote, ‘is a point that sets itself in motion (genesis of form).’ Thus the ...”