“... for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people racialised as black have been in Britain for more than two thousand years. During the third century, North African Roman soldiers formed part of the occupation of the British Isles: ‘Aurelian Moors’ were ...”

“... of theory to more concrete issues in social and constitutional history, provides the theme for David Runciman’s modestly titled but far-reaching book. Runciman’s study deals not with pluralism in its current, largely sociological, sense of ethnic, cultural, sexual and lifestyle diversity, but with pluralism in its early 20th-century political sense ...”

“... clear out of Russia and leave the Russians to fight it out among themselves’. In Britain, David Lloyd George had similar reservations, but his government included a passionate supporter of the intervention, the newly appointed minister of munitions and soon to be secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill.Wilson’s scepticism meant that the ...”

“... were the more likely draw.At Aldbourne the troops learned that in January they would set sail for France, where they’d become part of the British Expeditionary Force, which had been assembling across the Channel since the declaration of war. Because of the imminence of their departure, the 67th Regiment was granted an extended home leave for Christmas. My ...”

“... portray the Zionist pioneers waging a war of independence against the British oppressor. Jon and David Kimche provided a good example of the conventional Israeli analysis of British policy in Both Sides of the Hill: Britain and the Palestine War (1960). ‘It was a mixture of ignorance, blundering, indecision and local bias against the Jews, encouraged by ...”

“... Cholmeley, but in each case orchestrated by Thomas Drury. A letter discovered a few years ago by David Riggs further highlights Drury’s involvement, because it shows he had a prior connection with Lord Keeper Puckering. On 8 November 1592 Lord Buckhurst wrote to Puckering: I did speak to Mr Drury according to your Lordship’s desire, and after a long ...”

“... When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies ...”

“... been written in English – even if, necessarily, by an author deeply knowledgable about France. You would want it not to clank and whirr as it dutifully renders every single nuance, turning the text into the exposition of a novel rather than a novel itself. You would want it to provoke in you most of the same reactions as it would provoke in a ...”

“... different conferences to attend as the representative of the new moral order in Bavaria – one in France, one in Germany and one in Switzerland. He could have gone to Paris, to witness the start of the peace negotiations that were to culminate in August in the Treaty of Versailles. Alternatively, he could have gone to Weimar, where he was expected to attend ...”

“... again. This task took on a new urgency once it was clear that large, well-managed realms (like France) would always defeat small city-states (like Florence and Siena). Kings and their dynasties could legitimise the hold of these new, large-scale states over their subjects by giving them a human face (in the language of Hobbes, which came to be the language ...”

“... for burlesque, rather than for the tragic or pastoral mode of the works by Ingres and Manet and David which he takes as his sources. A visit to the Hôtel Salé in the Marais where the Musée Picasso opened a year ago is as exhilarating and depressing as a trip to the Royal Academy exhibition. Here, too, there are masterpieces from the artist’s own ...”

“... to numerous sources and ploughed through plenty of old material, from the early involvement of France in the Israeli nuclear programme and the revelations of Mordecai Vanunu, the former technician from the Dimona nuclear plant kidnapped by the Israelis and now in jail, to the arrest of Jonathan Pollard, the American Jew who passed some 500,000 pages of ...”

“... non-discursive, philosophy. Heidegger’s work on Nietzsche has been influential, particularly in France, but to me these lectures seem to do no good to the understanding of Nietzsche, nor to gain anything from it, but mainly to be a hideous example of several things that Nietzsche explicitly and rightly hated. It is certain, even if not everyone has yet come ...”

“... Brigade in the later stages of the Civil War. He spent the years 1939-42 in an internment camp in France, where he joined the Italian Communist Party. On his return to Albania, he rapidly became the main Partisan military commander. He was universally recognised by friend and foe alike as by far the most able Partisan military leader. He led the forces which ...”

“... one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian.’ Of all the thinkers who emerged in postwar France and are now loosely – and unhelpfully – coralled into the collective named, variously, structuralism, post-structuralism or (stranger yet) ‘French Theory’, Deleuze is the least well known or understood in the English-speaking world. It is easy to ...”