“... threaten war – and we say ahlan wasahlan [welcome]. We are ready!’ Both the United States and France, Israel’s main arms supplier, urged Eshkol not to fire the first shot. Lyndon Johnson told Abba Eban, the foreign minister, that his military experts thought that if the Egyptians attacked, which was unlikely, the Israelis would ‘whip the hell out of ...”

“... Iran and what’s known as the P-5 + 1 group of nations (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China and Germany) are scheduled to conclude on 30 June. A ‘framework agreement’ was set out in April, but still at issue is what kind of access inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency will have. Iran has agreed to inspections ...”

“... we can find any places before the French Revolution, except for small refugee communities in France and the Netherlands and the ancient communities in Northern Italy and the South of France, where the totality of Jews, and not merely the elite, were integrated into the surrounding society, where, for example, they ...”

“... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did not. Writing in ...”

“... hard to find in this country. Now the second collection, Points de Repère, issued in France in 1981 (revised 1985), is available, in a rearranged format with a translation by the late Martin Cooper, under the title Orientations. It is a pity that we do not have both collections freshly to hand, for any consideration of Boulez’s importance as a ...”

“... stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things? I remembered him as quite handsome, with the ...”

“... man has revealed the hidden depths, the ugly unmastered history, of the country he claims to lead. David Duke, the former Imperial Wizard of the Klan and a former Louisiana state representative, whose endorsement Trump could barely bring himself to disavow, said that Unite the Right was intended to ‘fulfil the promises of Donald Trump’. When Fields set off ...”

“... abroad, though with important local variations. In Brazil, there were ‘flying platters’; in France, ‘flying crêpes’. A second wave of saucers made headlines in 1950. If we reject the idea that a sudden influx of low-flying spaceships was responsible, it doesn’t mean all the witnesses were lying. Perhaps they saw shooting stars, comets or ...”

“... of three referendums which challenged the grand designs of Brussels have been ignored – in France and the Netherlands in 2005, in Greece in 2015 – and three have led to a second vote: Denmark in 1993; Ireland in 2002 and 2009.) Mediapart likes to stress the undemocratic nature of the EU: ‘stolen from its citizens’ by ‘the markets’, ‘finance ...”

“... Swinton was instructed by Kitchener, whom he had known in South Africa, to travel immediately to France as an official Eyewitness and write a series of reports to be sent directly to Kitchener as Secretary of State for War: having forbidden normal press coverage of the war, Kitchener would decide whether to authorise publication or not, as he saw fit. In any ...”

“... the export of Poussin’s paintings (including the Phocion pictures themselves) from Rome to France corresponds to the gathering and return of Phocion’s ashes. Both Poussin and Phocion were, it seems, accorded recognition only in their absence, and the paintings reflect this by taking as their subject the absent body of the general, which appears first ...”

“... all the many commentators in the West who had something to say about the Hebron events, only one, David Shipler of the New York Times, made a connection between Baruch Goldstein, political Judaism and Zionism itself. All of them, he said correctly, are aspects of each other: they can’t be broken up into smaller, separate units called ‘single deranged ...”

“... with about as much in common as Michael Howard and Dennis Skinner. One of them is described by David Solkin in his Painting for Money, reviewed in these pages last year by Ronald Paulson. Solkin’s Hogarth is an ambitious social climber, determined to efface the memory of his beginnings as an apprentice in the trade of silver-engraving, and to become a ...”

“... of the opposite sex. Mrs Moore was the mother of a fellow cadet, and the two boys, before going to France, agreed that Clive – who never used his own Christian name but was known as ‘Jack’ – would ‘look after’ her should her son be killed. Her son was killed, and it is possible, even likely, that Jack’s relationship with her would have developed ...”