“... said. Ruby felt financially secure, and when her landlord – a woman who lived in the South of France and referred to rental income as ‘my pocket money’ – decided on a whim to sell the house, issuing the occupants with a Section 21 ‘no fault’ eviction notice, the sudden awareness of her structural vulnerability as a tenant came as a shock.Ruby ...”

“... beat us with, and pursues the possibility that their weaknesses might be the obverse of our own. David Nettler, the language expert who falls into Oitarian thought patterns, gives a long account of what it is like to enter that alien ‘mindscape’: Somehow the senses – the body – seemed to grow dim, so that it was an inert mechanism, like a corpse ...”

“... further behind in the degree to which it is implemented. According to the claims made here, even France, that notorious monument of unaccountable state power qualified only by the unco-operativeness of its citizens, is more liberal in these matters than Britain. Different problems are raised by freedom of information in the two kinds of case. In the ...”

“... of lovers in the Islamic haadith, the Heroides of Ovid and the western courtly romances, and David Swale (all too briefly) discusses the limitations of D.H. Lawrence when read in the light of the German Bildungsroman, with its freedom and spiritual adventurousness which is at the same time related to the sense of a given community: these, however, are ...”

“... well as his view of laughter as an aid to sociability; so too did Hutcheson’s pupil Adam Smith. David Hume often resorted to ridicule to undermine hypocrisy or superstition, even if he doubted its capacity to settle controversial questions, arguing that mockery was as likely to distort as to reveal the truth. Some of Hume’s philosophical adversaries, such ...”

“... with the theme of the forest and trees central to the Nazi myth. In a picture recalling Caspar David Friedrich’s The Chasseur in the Forest, Kiefer paints himself in a white gown, holding a burning branch in a thick forest, the oil layered and dripping as if the work was itself the outcome of a pagan rite. With Kiefer there is always a sense of meanings ...”

“... books and the database of slaving voyages compiled in the 1990s by a group of historians headed by David Eltis and Herbert Klein. It ranges from the counting houses of Liverpool and Bristol to the ‘factories’ (slave-trading outposts) of West Africa and the slave markets of the Caribbean. The book is episodic and sometimes confusing. It lacks a clear ...”

“... global order. The catchphrase for the future might be: Move over America – Europe is back!’ In France, Marcel Gauchet, theorist of democracy and an editor of Le Débat, the country’s central journal of ideas, explains, more demurely, that ‘we may be allowed to think that the formula the Europeans have pioneered is destined eventually to serve as a ...”

“... Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer ...”

“... something strange to him. At last the unused plates, along with a few boomerangs, come back to France, but without the photographer, who has drifted away from his project after meeting a man who ‘avoided all mirrors ... Needless to say, he could no longer be sure of what he now looked like.’ Learning from this encounter that ‘the shadows of ...”

“... escapist fantasy. In 1900 the public needed real heroes and it found them – in Britain, as in France and Germany – in its soldiers and its Empire. At no other period in British history have soldiers enjoyed such glamour. Neither Wellington, in an earlier period, nor Montgomery, in a later, was ever the object of such fervour. Writing in the era of ...”

“... immediately, despite Chamberlain’s frantic attempts to hang on, the age of Churchill began. David Faber, an Old Etonian and, like Leo and Julian Amery, a former Tory MP, has had the good idea of writing the story of the father and his two sons. Julian was appointed minister of aviation by his father-in-law, Macmillan, and could claim to be the man ...”

“... made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David Cameron of his generation, blessed with born-to-the-purple public school assumptions and a casual, unimaginative indifference to the everyday struggles of the masses. Not that there was ever any ‘swank’ about Attlee, but at Oxford between 1901 and 1904 ...”

“... negotiator, said the two sides were ‘still far away’ from an agreement; his UK counterpart, David Frost, admitted there were ‘considerable gaps’. Barnier’s gloomy forecast was that a trade deal was now ‘unlikely’. Barnier hasn’t sounded positive about any of the negotiations he has been involved in since the referendum. The two sides talk ...”

“... dependent on the Americans both to maintain it and to mount any effective invasion of Northern France in the following year. No conclusive Churchillian thrust into the soft underbelly of Europe remained on the cards. And so at this point, just 50 years ago, the balance of the world decisively shifted. The United States took over the role of premier Western ...”