“... 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 ...”

“... the Greeks’ ‘swift’ and ‘seafaring’ ships are beached throughout the Iliad. ‘Early rose-fingered dawn’ is mentioned so often in Homer for much the same reason a blues singer might tell you he ‘woke up this morning’: in part to buy time while composing the next line. (As it happens, Parry corresponded with John and Alan Lomax, who ...”

“... harder to access. I have stood at the site of a Neanderthal shelter at Buoux in the South of France and been hit by an overwhelmingly strong feeling of remoteness, the idea that these people, these similar-but-different humans, were so far from anywhere human and place-like that they must have been hiding from something. Their very existence – we now ...”

“... But it increased pensions, supplementary benefits and family allowances. Public expenditure rose from 34 per cent of GDP in 1964-65 to 38 per cent in 1969-70. More went on health, social services and education. Feminist aspirations were acknowledged in the Equal Pay Act of 1970. Though it was private members whose Bills legalised abortion and adult ...”

“... then by geography, the two women only meeting once again after the Brownings first set sail for France. And Miss Mitford, of course, was no longer the only one with whom EBB could talk poetry. In later years, the frequency and intensity of the correspondence gradually diminish: the second volume of these letters covers just two years, while the third ...”

“... Ranelagh, by the Chelsea Hospital, had to be protected by a dedicated Bow Street patrol. Felonies rose by 50 per cent, and now that felons could no longer be shipped to America, more and more of them had to be hanged. John Townsend, taken on as a runner at this time, later looked back nostalgically to this time, when ‘we never had an execution wherein we ...”

“... wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made sanctions again seem a better alternative and their use rose dramatically. They have also grown more powerful, focusing on what Edward Fishman in his new study describes as one of the key ‘chokepoints’ in the world economy: control of the US dollar. Maritime trade has always had to negotiate geographic ...”

“... sun had dried it to a dusky goldbeater-skin film, cracked lozengewise by the heat; and as the wind rose, each lozenge rising a little, curled up at the edges as if it were a dumb tongue.’ This is very ‘Martian’, with its intent observation of the surface of things, its reliance on the slightly shallow brilliance of simile as opposed to the deeper, more ...”

“... at Hussein’s last rites are the inheritors of the colonial project of 1919, when Britain and France divided the Arab world along unwanted, artificial frontiers and awarded a speck of it to European Jews. Their regimes remain illegitimate, in that their people had no voice in choosing them, and dictatorial, in that they use force to sustain their rule. If ...”

“... soon as dinner was despatched,’ he wrote of his teenage years, ‘in a chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, I drew in my chair to the table and proceeded to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon with wonder.’ Stevenson’s life has come to seem one that can offer ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”