“... light until dusk; 100 tons of bombs were dropped in a single day, but Neugass was still a long way north-east of Teruel with a ridge of mountains to cross. The Republican armies held their ground. Early in January, Colonel Rey d’Harcourt, Franco’s commanding officer in Teruel, surrendered the town to the government. By then Neugass, Barsky, the medics and ...”

“... Mbembe was told that he’d been accused of antisemitism. The festival is funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which – like most German states – has in recent years cancelled funding for organisations and individuals with ties to the pro-Palestinian BDS movement. Mbembe’s case made headlines. Even some of the more conservative German papers ...”

“... of Sea Power upon History (1890), we might stress the derring-do of the Royal Navy, or – as Paul Kennedy did recently – the role of public finance. Brewer concentrates on organisational factors, and isolates three that were crucial. First and foremost, Britain’s army and navy trebled in size in the century after the Glorious Revolution. By the ...”

“... satire on the town as the evil headquarters of imperial oppression, the icy giant of the North. ‘Naturally I despise my country from head to foot,’ wrote Pushkin, ‘but I am not going to let a foreigner get away with sharing that feeling.’ Here is how a Russian writes a poem about his own tyranny, he seems to say. ‘It was the best of ...”

“... spoils the effect by having another heroic character call him ‘the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul’. A self-referential passage in the same book has someone explaining how to write a mystery novel. You take three images at random – ‘say, an old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop ...”

“... especially outside Ireland, may wonder at the gap in sensibility between Heaney (born in 1939) and Paul Muldoon (born in 1951), but to read about Heaney’s first years, his ‘nineteen-fifties/Of iron stoves and kin groups still in place’, is to see that the two poets do come from different generations: ‘I was well and truly formed,’ Heaney says, ‘by ...”

“... the Canadian poet, classical scholar, essayist and translator became suddenly prominent in North America; she had found readers in Britain as well by 2001, when The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A memorial to Carson’s late brother, Michael, Nox has found as much attention, and as much praise, as any ...”

“... cannot wait.’ And even as critics of the war were focusing their anger on the neo-Jacobinism of Paul Wolfowitz and Co, the old Metternich hand was, as Bob Woodward reported, exerting a ‘powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush’s Iraq policy’, regularly meeting with the president and Cheney, dusting off his old Vietnam-era memos to urge the ...”

“... group had spent a couple of days in the Iraq Museum and then split into two units, one going north to Nineveh, Nimrud, Assur and Hatra, the other south to Babylon, Kish, Nippur, Uruk, Ur, Lagash. The Unesco team, however, was allowed only a limited stay in the country, was not permitted to go outside Baghdad, and its members had to live in tents in the ...”

“... as leader of the free world.The early years of US foreign policy were focused on dominating the North American landmass. Native populations were liquidated; vast territories were purchased from European states; border disputes were stitched up through legal manoeuvrings. The fledgling US state conducted a few experiments further afield. In 1821, a ...”

“... but also about recent films such as Alien: Resurrection (‘inventive, honest and frank’) and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (‘I’ve seen it twice and I like it a lot’).At some point I wrote a fan letter to David Thomson. In his reply, he urged me to develop interests other than film. That was Spielberg’s problem, Thomson said – he didn’t ...”

“... by the return of hostages, the US and allies’ refraining from joint military exercises, and the North Korean destruction of test facilities. The process has only just begun, but the foreign policy establishment, from the Council on Foreign Relations to Fareed Zakaria, have struck an odd posture by declaring peaceful relations with ...”

“... rather than legal consequence. The IPC drew on the ‘famine scales’ drawn up by the scholars Paul Howe and Stephen Devereux. Their prototype had two dimensions. ‘Magnitude’ was measured by the number who had perished from starvation and related causes, and by extension, the total affected population. ‘Severity’ measured the intensity of ...”

“... and the war in Vietnam come as news from outside. He writes of his own frustrations, of Garvey, Paul Robeson and Toussaint. The letters have been through the censor; and many things must therefore be addressed obliquely. As the months pass, the politically conscious character who is making himself physically and mentally strong is subdued by ...”

“... that academics started taking an interest in the history of blacks in Britain. In the Sixties, Paul Edwards, originally a specialist in Old Icelandic, produced editions of the two most important African-British writers of the 18th century, Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano. In the Seventies, the Black Power movement’s insistence on the need for black ...”