“... with the constitutional reconstruction of Europe immediately after 1945, when Germany, Italy and France were redefined as democracies in which the ultimate power to protect the constitution rested not with elected representatives but with the courts: the Bundesverfassunggericht in Germany, for example, and similar tribunals in ...”

“... putsch. He insisted afterwards that it was a coincidence; he had meant to holiday in the South of France but had taken the wrong train. Now he rushed to Barcelona, and signed up as a war correspondent as the fighting began. Ross came out to join him and – with brief returns to London – he spent the next two years in Spain, writing and eventually ...”

“... stalemate of 1916 Germany was far nearer the end of its resources than Britain. Britain and France were always likely to be the last men standing. Inevitably, Lloyd George disliked and despised the generals and was always looking for ways to sack them, though, to be fair, he also had far more of a politician’s horror at the size of the casualty lists ...”

“... Between them​ France and Britain had more than 450 million imperial subjects at the start of World War One. Germany, despite the geographical size of its African acquisitions, had fewer than 20 million. All three empires threw colonial manpower into the conflict, in Africa, Anatolia, the Middle East and Europe. In Britain, as in Germany, there was strong resistance to the idea of African contingents bearing arms on European soil ...”

“... together like strangers in a broken lift. The first is a sort of sex-drenched road trip through France some time in the 1980s. We then shift to Khartoum in 1884 (just before the Berlin Conference and the division of Africa) and a novella in diary entries about the last days of General Gordon. We remain in Africa for the third section, with a man called ...”

“... film’s stars, Warren Oates, had a fling with Becky, though she ended up marrying its other star, Peter Fonda. And then McGuane saw Margot Kidder. It’s like a libertarian Bonnie and Clyde – ‘we rob banks,’ without quite needing the money – and the mood is vital to the 1970s: the people to love faithfully are those you never quite have.Cue Tuesday ...”

“... and his extensive espionage work on behalf of Robert Harley, Defoe was an indefatigable writer. Peter Earle, in the introduction to The World of Defoe (1976), confesses the alarm he experienced when ‘with the contract signed, I began to realise just what I had let myself in for ... To my horror I discovered that Defoe was probably the most prolific writer ...”

“... An editorial pointed out that in European terms this would mean proportionately 100,000 dead in France, 150,000 in the new Germany, and in Great Britain close to 120,000 dead. The newsfilm of funerals, grieving relatives, the details of killings and woundings that surface casually in conversation all form part of the – would the term be? – discourse of ...”

“... well known of these, such as Anthony Hamilton, an Anglo-Irish Jacobite who followed James II to France and there, writing in French, inaugurated the tradition of elegant mockery of the excesses of The Arabian Nights that opened the way for the rationalist arabesques of Voltaire and others. Warner might have included many more. James Joyce pays frequent ...”

“... of the godly cause – Sir Walter Mildmay, founder of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the MP Peter Wentworth, who agitated for further reform of the English church and its liturgy – may deserve further attention. He once declared that ‘I would have all reformations done by public authority. It were very dangerous that every private man’s zeal ...”

“... by the French ambassador’s enjoining Titian to copy a likeness that had been made previously in France. The failure to give convincing vitality to the bishop’s face is especially noticeable because of the narrative dimension that Titian has added by showing Philandrier eagerly taking dictation. ‘Pope Paul III and His ...”

“... exits from another. His failure to spot Cairo will very nearly prove fatal. Since Cairo is Peter Lorre at his most flamboyant, you would have to be quite far gone in self-congratulation not to notice him. Spade has failed to understand that a corridor is less a space than a channel of communication through which people, things and messages pass in both ...”

“... living in Mallorca in the second. In the first she has escaped the round-ups of Jews in Occupied France, and kills herself in Milan much later. In the second she is not Jewish, and what she has survived is a raffish 1960s youth which involved, among other things, a little larceny and a little prostitution, and hanging out with ...”

“... has predecessors within the Zionist establishment. In The Holocaust in American Life (1999), Peter Novick noted that the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El-Husseini (a sworn enemy of both Zionists and British colonialism, who had met with Eichmann and had great expectations of a Nazi victory), was depicted in Gutman’s Encyclopedia as one of ...”

“... not ordered and evaluated. (Anyone interested in these questions would be well advised to tackle Peter Baldwin’s less discursive but analytically more hard-headed Contagion and the State in Europe 1830-1930,* which seeks to explain the varied responses to the similar problems posed by cholera, smallpox and syphilis in Britain, ...”