“... France, always averse to identity politics, tended to agree.Caribbean, Asian, Turkish or North African were no longer the descriptions that mattered. The defining term was ‘Muslim’: what Muslims did and thought was suddenly central to the immigration debate. Increasingly, the debate was about protecting European values by trying to bring existing ...”

“... at Home in German Dugouts!’) I’ve got a whole shelf on war artists: C.R.W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, William Roberts, Wyndham Lewis, and the skullishly named Muirhead Bone. I’ve got books about Fabian Ware and the founding of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I’ve a 1920 Blue Guide to Belgium and the Western Front and a Michelin Somme guide ...”

“... to have made a permanent mark. It was founded and edited by Eugene Jolas (initially with Elliot Paul), and Jolas, too, was at the heart of art movements about which at the time the outside world knew little – Surrealism, Dadaism and Joyce among them. Few small mags have done as much to ‘make art free’. As well as Stein’s ‘Elucidation’, the first ...”

“... public treatments for it, until he comes to realise he is happier sexless – released from his North London modern marriage, regressing into his monastic, homosexual Oxford community, though that is at the very point of succumbing to co-education. The more you think about this novel, the less the end reads like a solution, and the less Amis’s thinking ...”

“... nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French protest was signed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Aragon.The king and his advisers took the view that Morocco must forge its own post-independence path. Why should left-leaning states in the Third World and ex-colonial powers, harping on the rights they had denied in the past, tell Hassan ...”

“... Achebe’s corollary does not necessarily follow – that, therefore, these ‘savages living just north of Conrad’s River Congo’ could not have been savages after all. The history of art and the history of savagery in Europe show clearly enough that sophistication in the first hardly impinged on the sophistication of the latter – from ...”

“... or more accurately, were ‘disappeared’ in the Argentinian sense, like the Picts of North-Eastern Scotland. There was a time not long ago when the Palestinians looked like ideal candidates for disappearance. They could see the last sky coming, and after it nothing. Right up until the peace agreement last year there was no certainly of ...”

“... public than was the case with the keen lovers of the contemporary art of former periods. In North America, over the last quarter of a century at least, ‘modernism’ has almost always meant large works designed for the Museums of Modern Art. The first artists to produce works for such a destination were the supposed founders of the Modern ...”

“... Square declared.) My own experience of being got away, by car from London to Cwm-yr-Eglwys on the north Pembrokeshire coast, at least found some relief towards its conclusion in the spectacle of the Port Talbot steelworks, a lattice of towers and gantries backlit by sunset and threaded through with plumes of steam. But I knew exactly how they felt.Hulot is a ...”

“... of the skirmish at Clifton, just south of Penrith, in December 1745, as the Jacobites moved back north. In this, what O’Keeffe calls the last battle ‘ever fought on English soil’, government dragoons had dismounted when the Appin Stewarts and MacPhersons charged downhill out of the winter dusk. A MacPherson remembered ‘the great hurry with which we ...”

“... he himself, though exiled and out of favour through accidents of war, unquestionably belonged. As Paul Cartledge writes in his introduction to Tom Holland’s new translation of Herodotus, the resemblance Thucydides’ merciless analysis of civil war on Corfu bears to Orwell’s reading of totalitarianism, complete with doublespeak, was exploited to some ...”

“... many of the world’s most powerful finance ministers, economic experts, lawyers and politicians north to the White Mountains. At the opening of the conference, the main attraction seemed to have been Keynes himself. According to Lionel Robbins, he ‘was photographed from at least 50 angles … Lord Keynes standing up; Lord Keynes sitting down; Lord ...”

“... Grief Management Council. He works in the New York Stock Exchange, she in the World Trade Center, north tower, 83rd Floor. Both are ciphers, spun by the formal games and architectural spaces and personal circles they move in. The book begins in an airplane, destination unknown, as the passengers watch the in-flight movie about revolutionary terrorists ...”

“... was nothing to morality except emotion. He also made a trip to Paris, where he learned about Jean-Paul Sartre and the existentialist doctrine that our characters are the product of our unconstrained choices. He noticed that Ayer and Sartre, despite their different styles, were dancing to the same philosophical tune: both hoped to achieve moral liberation by ...”

“... etc – by the ‘primes’. Silicon Valley wants a piece of this bounty.When​ colonists in North America began to mobilise against British rule, the army found itself short of the engineering skills required for fighting a war. Many French officers joined the Continental Army as sappers and miners, and as builders of fortifications, trenches, naval ...”