“... the Thames. Waldorf and Nancy hosted epic house parties there, welcoming, among others, Shaw, Amy Johnson, Roosevelt (F.D.), Henry Ford, Asquith, Charlie Chaplin, J.M. Barrie, Churchill, Henry James, Edith Wharton, kings and queens and Mahatma Gandhi. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand spent a weekend there not long before his assassination. By the 1930s, the guest ...”

“... severely every time they dare to take advantage of their position to deceive the citizens or to arm bigotry and royalism against the Republic.’Fouché went on the offensive and helped topple Robespierre, imagining he would replace him. But the events of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) marked a turning point in the revolution. What had initially appeared to be ...”

“... his work on popular memory and for History Workshop. John Merrick’s new selection of his essays aims to rectify that: it brings together a sample of Samuel’s historical studies, several of which are still thrilling to read, and most of which would have been difficult to get hold of without access to a good university library. All of them focus on the 19th ...”

“... was different this time was that he wasn’t able to take the key players in his party with him. Johnson’s defection was perhaps to be expected – though Cameron does not appear to have prepared for it – but Gove’s was not. Had Cameron known that his decision would split the Tory Party at the very top, including his own inner circle, it might have ...”

“... him to the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly and Ray Johnson.Opinion is divided about his appearance. ‘He thought of himself as ugly,’ a boyfriend from the early 1960s said. ‘But when you saw Andy naked, he looked like a beautiful boy.’ Another lover from the same period describes him as ‘almost repulsive ...”

“... the Jordanian border, and were civil engineering students. After Daraa was besieged by the Syrian army in April 2011, the brothers fled to London, where they continued their studies. Mohammad went to the University of West London. They also worked part-time – Mohammad did shifts in a shoe shop and in Harrods – and they moved into a private rental in ...”

“... catalogues of rare-book dealers. Her bust of Mussolini gathers dust in the basement of the Herbert Johnson Museum at Cornell University.) The whole affair is not without comic touches – Pound offers ‘my support’ to Mussolini, as though it might be of momentous significance to him – and an element of absurdity: consider a number of the Transatlantic ...”

“... consultants they plan to remake Afghanistan in much the way their forebears in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations sought to forge a new Vietnam alongside the backroom boys from the Rand Corporation. As in Vietnam, indigenous resistance to the American project is hindering its realisation. Security is an obsession, the precondition for achieving the ...”

“... of forces such as institutionalised racism (he collaborated with the Black sociologist Charles S. Johnson), while his democratic instincts in general introduced a note of human warmth into the chilly atmosphere of the American psychoanalytic establishment.Sullivan died in 1949, by which time Pearce had a thriving practice of her own. She had also succumbed to ...”

“... futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. ‘Rough, rude men’ had been sent ‘all over the country’ to gather the iniquitous poll tax and the mood was ...”

“... unforeseen ways.’ Washington funded a number of political and cultural organisations, with the aim of keeping African nations out of Moscow’s sphere of influence. The Africa-America Institute, for example, which sent Horace Mann Bond (president of Nkrumah’s alma mater, Lincoln University) to the conference, was a CIA ...”

“... us the history of his ancestors in Eastern Europe, his grandfather Noah’s desertion from the army during the Russo-Turkish War, his parents’ emigration to America and so on. It’s tedious going, not because the subject matter is boring but because Schwartz wanted Genesis to have a ‘morbid pedestrianism … The diction of this deliberate flatness ...”

“... are a small minority (more confessional votes are cast in Israel than Pakistan), as within the Army. Officers and other ranks who have worked with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Lashkar-i-Tayyaba in Kashmir have become infected with zealotry. At the same time native Islamists, aware of their weakness in the country, have focused their efforts on the ...”

“... Career’, Charles Lane examined Powell’s ascent to power during April 1969, when the Army’s official investigation into the My Lai massacre was reluctantly creaking to life. Powell, it turns out, was assigned to Americal Division headquarters at Chu Lai. Charlie Company’s parent outfit, in April 1969, more than a year after the massacre was ...”

“... under way. Agnew was sufficiently inspired by the Rhodesian cause to try to join the country’s army, but failed to make it through officer training. He came back to England when he realised Rhodesia was doomed and a black majority-ruled Zimbabwe was going to replace it. ‘I wouldn’t have joined the Tories because of what they did to Rhodesia. That was ...”