“... true when we are trying to untangle humanity’s relationship with the natural environment,’ David Blackbourn writes, in this magnificently compelling, vivid and often pioneering book. Its subject is Germany’s struggle to subjugate its landscape, above all its waters, over the last 250 years. But its implications apply to the contemporary world, to the ...”

“... opening pages of Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion, the archaeologist David Lewis-Williams examines the earliest records of symbolic behaviour. It is unlikely we will ever pinpoint just when the human habit of investing objects with significance took hold. But for the moment, until fresh discoveries arrive, the most striking ...”

“... early 17th centuries. Against the grim background of protracted civil war in the Netherlands, in France and in Germany, Neostoicism offered a philosophy of fortitude and consolation not merely to intellectuals but to princes and statesmen. It was a philosophy for laymen, who found in pagan literature a restorative retreat from the conflicting ideologies of ...”

“... rather than a genre novel), Dirty Snow. The book was written in the US in 1948: Simenon had left France after being accused of collaborating with the German occupation. He had allowed a Nazi-run film company to adapt his novels, and one had been turned into anti-Semitic propaganda. His younger brother, Christian, had been condemned to death for collaboration ...”

“... UN agencies, trade-union bodies, student and youth associations. My plan was to visit France briefly, but I stayed nearly ten years. For anyone living in Paris, the Algerian war was inescapable. Where did your sympathies lie? Which side were you on? In 1960 at an international youth conference in Accra, I struck up a friendship with the two ...”

“... the same root as ‘rune’ or ‘secret’. The drama of the proceedings zings off the pages of David Carpenter’s magisterial new study. What Carpenter does better than his rivals or predecessors is to make clear the continuing intensity of events after Runnymede and the hectic pace of them. Within days of its sealing, engrossments of the Charter were ...”

“... few decades, through the publication of multi-volume national histories of the book (1982-86 in France, ongoing in Britain and elsewhere); through the efforts of a professional society with a prominent journal (Book History), a hyperactive discussion list (sharp-l@listserv.indiana.edu), and an overstuffed website (www.sharpweb.org); and eventually through ...”

“... his anointed successor John Connally, the former Democrat governor of Texas. In Nixon’s Shadow, David Greenberg explores Nixon’s place in modern American culture. While other politicians struggled for name recognition, manifold images of Nixon infiltrated every level of American life from the early 1950s and persisted long after the Watergate scandal ...”

“... on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David Hume. He took a turn through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and ...”

“... place in which British readers took a thoughtful or sentimental interest – rather like France in the days when reputable British papers carried a ‘Letter from Paris’. The author had gone to Israel soon after the embarrassment of Anthony Eden’s ‘police action’ at Suez: she taught at the Hebrew University, wrote film scripts for the Jewish ...”

“... in October 1956. It was initiated not by the Arabs but by Israel, in collusion with Britain and France, against Egypt, now the standard bearer of radical Arab nationalism. The period 1949-56 may be seen simply as an interval between the first and second rounds. But it was a critical phase in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a period of increasing ...”

“... it was recognised that the country could no longer shirk the draconian measures that Germany and France had adopted long before the war began. But the gap between the BEF of 1914 and the conscript army of 1917-18 had been filled by a second force of 2,500,000 volunteers, and it was the fate of this group that gave birth to the ‘lost generation’ myth. The ...”

“... covers the years from 1907 to 1920 or 1921, had been taken down from dictation by the novelist David Plante and was still substantially unrevised. A third section consists of fragments from a diary of the 1940s. The second part is dull by comparison with the first, though the events are interesting enough: a brief period at the Perse School in ...”

“... ceremonial bantering of heralds than fighting à l’outrance. Riots in 18th-century England and France also acquired conventional forms, a language of gestures and moves known to the adversaries, and a set of constraining regulations. Social historians have referred to them as ‘collective bargaining by riot’. Conflict in civil society has almost never ...”

“... the difference betwixt a free and an arbitrary country, – between the despotism of the King of France and the despotism of the Parliament of England? It is a solecism in politics, and an absurdity in terms, to say that in a limited Government there can be unlimited Power.’ In the 1770s these had little chance of being anything but minority views. For ...”