“... they held in the Veneto to crush the rebellions in Bologna and Ancona. But, ironically, it was France, a newly formed republic with a constitution committed to defending other republics, which set out to retake Rome for the pope; a French army disembarked at the port of Civitavecchia on 25 April.Thousands gathered to defend the city and the dream of a ...”

“... spontaneous wit besides. I was working with him at the time when Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose was being laboriously raised from the depths of the Solent. This was being done by means of a cradle when suddenly a cable snapped and the wreck slipped back into the water.‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘A slight hiccup on the atypical journey from grave to ...”

“... of deindustrialisation and plant closure in Northern cities had generated new anxieties. As prices rose and steady work disappeared, the Great Society policies that many had seen as generous and sensible became more divisive. Recent histories of Johnson’s presidency have emphasised the way that his liberalism managed to encode a range of racial stereotypes ...”

“... have died, had it not been for Randa Habib, a Lebanese journalist who broke the story to Agence-France Presse. General Samih Batikhi, head of the GID, insisted that nothing more than a fight between locals and tourists had taken place; another official suggested that Mishal’s driver had sparked the row by making unwelcome advances to the Canadians. The ...”

“... the word ‘terrorism’ in his early responses to the attack. In fact, what Obama had said in the Rose Garden of the White House on the day after Stevens died was that it had been ‘an act of terror’. His advisers, including Rhodes and chief speechwriter Jon Favreau, drummed into him that he must repeat this precise form of words, rather than getting ...”

“... of global access, not least as a result of airline price wars. It occurred at a time when France, Germany, Britain and others had made up their minds that the postwar experiment with immigration from the South was over. Refugees have paid a high price for this decision. They have also paid for the new prestige of the North American social and economic ...”

“... in 1933, and that we are reading an exact, first-hand account from this invisible man? Housman rose, placed a brown-covered small octavo pamphlet (of paged proofs?) upon the reading-desk and immediately began to read. He spoke slowly, with precision, in a pleasant, even, low, but clear and well-modulated voice, not raising his eyes, and frequently ...”

“... in an industrialised nation-state. The ultimate beneficiaries were Vladimir Putin, who rose to power on a groundswell of resentful nationalism, and the oligarchs who gained ownership of privatised assets.When the media want to discuss whether Donald Trump is a fascist, whether Brexit is an imperialist project or the way pandemics end, historians ...”

“... in which Stevens found his niche at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in 1916; he rose to Vice President of the firm in 1934 and was still working there at the time of his death) but claims to hear ‘puns’ in such phrases as ‘barque of phosphor’ or ‘droning of the surf’ in the early ‘Fabliau of Florida’, or the ...”

“... Luther King Jr. Far from giving way in the face of moral example and legal right, racial injustice rose to fever pitch during the 1960s. The third and deadliest Ku Klux Klan (succeeding the Southern Klan of the late 1860s and the national Klan of the 1920s) dynamited churches where members of the black freedom struggle met. Klansmen beat and murdered civil ...”

“... only limited success did nothing to prevent ‘radio traitors’ everywhere being vilified: in France, Paul Ferdonnet and André Olbrecht, who recorded programmes in Stuttgart; in the States, ‘Tokyo Rose’, Mildred Gillars (‘Axis Sally’) and Ezra Pound, who was indicted for broadcasting from Italy; in ...”

“... send British and French troops to Egypt in 1956 was sealed during a secret meeting at Sèvres in France, where British, French and Israeli representatives agreed on a plan that would allow the Israelis to attack the Egyptians, and the British and French to intervene in order to separate them, reclaiming the canal in the process. The decision to send British ...”

“... Review in 1821, ‘what Asia and Africa are to Europe.’ Not quite. Modern capitalist empires – France, Holland and Great Britain in Africa, Asia and the Middle East – ruled over culturally and religiously distinct peoples. Anglo-American settlers, by contrast, looked to Iberian America not as an epistemic ‘other’ but as a rival in a fight to define a ...”

“... restaurants of Dubai, a city built on a Gotham-like scale, the wealthy eat oysters imported from France ($15 each at Atmosphere, the highest restaurant in the world, a quarter of a mile up the Burj Khalifa tower). The Gulf dynasties resemble the despotic families of 15th-century Italy and their city states. The earlier set of potentates owed their rise to ...”

“... of ten years. The semi-autobiographical novel describes Rilke’s initial shock at encountering France. As he relates in a letter of July 1903 to Lou Andreas-Salomé, Rilke’s time in Paris matched what had until then been the worst period of his life: ‘I would like to tell you, dear Lou, that Paris was for me an experience similar to military school; as ...”