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“... gravel of Martyrs’ Square in central Beirut, where early in the 20th century Lebanese patriots rose up against the Ottoman Empire and were slaughtered. The statue in the square commemorating their deaths is pockmarked with bullet holes from the civil war. There is a carnival atmosphere of the kind that often accompanies collective political ...”

“... way towards preferment. He became an MP, and found favour with Sir Robert Drury, who took him to France and the Low Countries in 1611-12. Absence always worked powerfully on Donne’s imagination, and according to Izaak Walton, his friend and first biographer, he had a vision while on this trip: ‘I have seen my dear wife pass twice by me through this ...”

“... developed to attack them, varied; and those programmes weren’t necessarily ‘progressive’. France was slow to develop comprehensive unemployment insurance but was a pioneer in addressing the costs of children’s dependence; Nazi Germany showered benefits on families, but only when they promoted the regime’s racial imperatives. Welfare policies meet ...”

“... props and costumes are always magically available. Claude Arnaud’s biography, first published in France more than ten years ago and now translated into English, describes a life that travels the distance from Proust to Bardot, not just chronologically but culturally, from Gallimard to the silver screen. The more time you spend with Cocteau the more Cocteaux ...”

“... sentenced to death. He escaped, possibly killing his guard, fled to Belgrade, Beirut and finally France, where he joined the Foreign Legion, was wounded and captured before escaping again and moving on to Britain to avoid the advancing Nazi forces.His decision to join the British army led to two noteworthy incidents. First, with reckless courage, he stormed ...”

“... and Erich Fromm, some well into the 1960s. By that time, however, structuralism was dominant in France and, despite the friendship Lévi-Strauss and Breton forged in New York, it was no ally to Surrealism. Poststructuralism was even less so. Yet Surrealist traces persist even there. Although Lacan reread Freud through structural linguistics, he was formed ...”

“... his father’s pacifism and spent the later part of the First World War as an orderly in northern France. After the war he studied architecture in London and then took a job as a clerk of works at the Plaza Paramount in Piccadilly, which had ornate Renaissance-style plasterwork and a Wurlitzer organ. The Plaza opened in 1926, the year before The Jazz ...”

“... principles of the great working-class movement, not only in Germany and Switzerland, but in France, in Holland and Belgium, in America, and even in Italy and Spain’. Growing in stature and influence as its message spread across the Continent, Capital had become ‘the Bible of the working class’ (a phrase Engels used without irony). In a letter of ...”

“... party in the pub shook their heads over the technological defeatism of the Americans: the missile rose out of the earth’s atmosphere, steered by four graphite rudders in its slipstream. One hundred kilometres up, it reached the top of an are as neat as the illustration of a parabola in a geometry textbook. You have to pause for a moment, there, as the ...”

“... glacial career testified), whereas the unfashionable engineers had serious peacetime duties, rose faster and could transfer back at a higher rank in the event of war. The ploy worked. MacArthur was never much of an engineer, but he learned the basics of harbours, pontoons and bridges, knowledge which would one day come in handy on remote Pacific ...”

“... anything in the 1990s, yet between 2005 and 2008 prices soared: wheat and maize grown in the US rose by about 130 per cent; so did American soya, which goes mostly to animal feed. Dairy prices shot up (butter by 74 per cent, powdered milk by 69 per cent); the price of chicken went up by two-thirds. A month before the banking meltdown in 2008, ‘food ...”

“... He held secret talks with China, made a deal of sorts with Libya, struck an agreement with France to purchase a plutonium-reprocessing plant and hired Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist then employed in Holland and now regarded, with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, as a parent of Pakistan’s ‘peaceful’ nuclear programme which competes with, but does not ...”

“... pretty bad century so far. This is partly a matter of electoral defeats, from the US to the UK to France, Germany, Italy, Brazil etc, but also a consequence of its failure to come up with a new ideological framework to match the new landscape. Many current problems seem likely to grow worse. In 1980, the bottom half of earners in the US took home 20 per cent ...”

“... unappealing to Rabat, which was racking up its external debt with every day the war drew on. France had supported the king, diplomatically and militarily, during the first phase of the takeover and would remain the most obstinate of Morocco’s allies. The US, too, was an important patron and when the Moroccans eventually hit on the idea of a long ...”

“... purchase with the advent of national accounting surveys, first in England around 1700 and later in France. In 1791 Antoine Lavoisier produced estimates of France’s income and wealth and, as Piketty points out with a hint of republican pride, ‘the new tax system established after the Revolution, which ended the privileges ...”