“... Arthur Rimbaud wrote the works and letters attributed to him. Or that he was born in 1854 in north-eastern France and died in Marseille in 1891, having spent the latter part of his life in Africa. Or that he was a teenage poet who stopped writing when he was twenty. But then what is the relation of a historical person to a work that scarcely ever seems ...”

“... involves placing Asia and the rising sun at the top and disregarding the compass point of the North. Once in India, Roe had to quickly reconsider the likelihood of England’s being feared as ‘a terror to all nations’. The Mughal emperor ruled around a hundred million people. A few years earlier, an EIC merchant called William Hawkins had fairly ...”

“... text has been held genuine by a Semitic philologist (Cyrus Gordon). Superior literacy has rendered North America more prolific in pre-Columbian testimonies. About ninety years ago, a runic inscription was dislodged from the roots of a tree in rural Minnesota: a party of Norsemen (both male and female) had got that far in the year 1362. Until recently the stone ...”

“... off to Germany, though the trains were intercepted and unloaded by partisans on their journey north. Ferrari, ever the pragmatist, turned a blind eye when the partisans among his workforce used his warehouses at night to repair their weapons and craft sabotage devices. He also gave sanctuary to an injured partisan fighter and (separately) a Jewish ...”

“... 11 per cent.For half a century we have been hearing that 1929 can never return, most recently from Paul Krugman of Princeton, who proposes the old Keynesian strategy for averting a world depression: cut interest rates, flood the markets with money, and if that fails, ensure that governments create demand. But Japan’s ‘lost decade’ has just seen the ...”

“... economy. The legitimacy of the Energy Profits Levy, as with the levy on ‘excess profits’ from North Sea oil in the 1980s, seems partly dependent on the sheer size of the ‘windfall’ and partly on the direct link to consumers’ bills. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine may indirectly have boosted the profits of firms in various sectors of the economy, but ...”

“... literary style, with its brusque movements and quick reversals, resisted stagnancy. For Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘a Césaire poem explodes and whirls about itself like a rocket’. Césaire coined the term peléean, from the volcanic Mount Pelée, which overlooked his home town of Basse-Pointe, to capture the way his poetry emerged ‘from a long accumulation ...”

“... a finer nuance of meaning. In their excellent compilation, The Jew in the Modern World (1980), Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz point out that the term’s origin is theological. More specifically, it ‘derives from the Septuagint, the Jewish translation of the Hebrew Scripture into Greek from the third century BC, in which holokaustos (“totally ...”

“... As dozens​ of lagoons of pig waste overflow in North Carolina, President Trump says that Hurricane Florence is ‘one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water’. (In North Carolina 9.7 million pigs produce ten billion gallons of manure a year.)*President Trump says: ‘I hope to be able to put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to expose something that is truly a cancer in our country ...”

“... to economic stagnation. Either way America had nothing to fear.In his cool-headed history, Schism, Paul Blustein takes issue with both these interpretations. So too do Bob Davis and Lingling Wei in their more journalistic account, Superpower Showdown. With hindsight it is clear that the policymakers of the 1990s and early 2000s did get some things wrong. They ...”

“... over much of Syria and Iraq and is spreading its tentacles south to the Gulf states and west to North Africa. How is this dreadful turn of events to be understood? Jean-Pierre Filiu, who teaches at Sciences Po in Paris after a career in France’s diplomatic corps which included tours of duty in Jordan, Syria and Tunisia, argues in his new book, From Deep ...”

“... economic and ideological power. To these he adds others on Afghanistan, international terrorism, North Korea and Iraq. This is a wide-ranging work, in other words, and it repays close study, even by readers who will not find its perspective altogether congenial or convincing. It was America’s reckless foreign policy after 11 September, Mann explains, that ...”

“... have seen it in my first vacation from Oxford in January 1955 and in memory had put it somewhere north of Oxford Street, Portman Square possibly. In fact it was in Forbes House in Belgrave Square: not knowing London I took Knightsbridge to be Oxford Street. Of the exhibition I recall only the two huge blackamoors at the foot of the staircase in the entrance ...”

“... by enlisting in a Global War on Terror. The terrorists, like the indigenous inhabitants of North America, would be defeated by American hunter heroes, fictional and historical: figures like Daniel Boone, Natty Bumppo and Davy Crockett – white men who replaced female captives as protagonists in the developing frontier mythology. In hunter hero ...”

“... Soul: stomping, emotional, rare Sixties American soul cuts that soundtracked a club scene in the North of England in the early Seventies. In Last Night a DJ Saved My Life Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton put Northern Soul in a historical context, not just as the ‘first rave culture’ but also ‘a vitally important step in the creation of today’s club ...”