“... if it was not up to the highest standards. Veyne no doubt owes his chair in the Collège de France to his Classical scholarship, even though it is for his work as a social theorist that he will achieve classic status. The central problem, to which Veyne offers a suitably complex answer, is that of explaining the institution of evergetism. Veyne ...”

“... But knowledge of his power is clearly present in the scenes where he woos Katherine of France in Henry V and Lady Anne in the film of Richard III. (It may even be there in his night scenes with his army before Agincourt.) The strongest, because most casual, evidence I saw him give of knowing it was in The Master Builder at the National Theatre in ...”

“... of his rage at intrusions into his privacy, and one remembers him forcing the withdrawal of John Peter’s article from Essays in Criticism because it suggested a homosexual element in his relationship with Jean Verdenal. Lyndall Gordon reports a conversation with Mary Trevelyan which makes him seem mildly amused about this imputation, but his first reaction ...”

“... in her personal life. I don’t view her personal life as a failure. Unlike her biographer John Peter Nettl, I don’t see the years after her break-up with Jogiches as the ‘lost years’. Nor do I consider that, as Adrienne Rich suggests, Luxemburg’s life is evidence that a woman’s ‘central relationship can be to her work, even as lovers come and ...”

“... Salvini of the Lega Nord in Italy and Marine Le Pen of the renamed Rassemblement National in France ultimately back away from any talk of exit from the EMU. Once the single currency was in force, people’s savings were held in euros. To leave the Monetary Union when this was an accomplished fact was to destroy their value. No party with a popular base ...”

“... for European figures like Elmar Altvater in Germany and Michael Löwy and the late André Gorz in France, when he admitted that his work dwelt on ‘the reconstruction of Marx’s approach rather than its application’. Ecomarxism spent its first decades in methodological throat-clearing, outlining but not yet undertaking a new kind of historical ...”

“... his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost circle of the school’. However, as Peter Campbell wrote in the LRB (3 February 2011), English painters ‘responded to Impressionism’s escape from the academic into the everyday, but made something tighter and darker of it. The French pleasure in picnics and river parties and weather wasn’t ...”

“... the remilitarisation of the Rhineland. The ‘nightmare’ was that diplomatic relations between France and Italy had reached such a low that Ferrari’s team couldn’t compete in the Pau Grand Prix.In 1937 the scuderia was dissolved and absorbed into Alfa Romeo, which had been entirely controlled by the corporatist state since 1933, and Ferrari was ...”

“... China and the US. In the early 1990s, Beijing sent officials to be trained in Singapore, but Peter Sloterdijk’s line that statues of Mao will one day be replaced with ones of LKY now seems a dated exuberance. The meritocratic ideology of Singapore has begun to show signs of wear, and its elite seems incapable of regenerating itself as that of the PRC ...”

“... school of regard. Wharton was best known for a column he wrote in the Telegraph under the name ‘Peter Simple’, and he was pleased to see in Hill’s austere lyricism a salutary rejection of vulgar modern mores, so I am not sure what he would have made of ‘Cute, my arse’ – not to mention, from later sections of the poem, ‘a shot of jism’, ‘a ...”

“... What’s more, the conflict is spreading to America’s allies, including Australia, Canada, France and the UK.It is hard to escape the impression that we have reached a point of historic rupture, and that is the feeling conveyed by this recent crop of books on Sino-American tensions. Not only do they offer a chronicle of mounting tension but, though ...”

“... bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal Theatre was giving a premiere, a one-act play ...”

“... workers. By 1980 the figure was 14.5 per cent; by 2020 it was less than 5 per cent. In France the proportion of people working in agriculture was 23 per cent in 1950 and 3 per cent in 2019. So much has changed in the last few decades. ‘The EU,’ Joyce writes, ‘lost 37 per cent of its farms between 2005 and 2020, almost all of which were tiny ...”

“... right’s swivel-eyed homophobia. A surprising number of gay men top the Trumpist pyramid (Peter Thiel, for instance, or the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent) and others lurk on its digital outskirts, but O’Neill isn’t one of them. He obviously didn’t believe his statements undermined his heterosexuality. Presumably this would be a risk only if ...”

“... diplomatic initiatives were planned, including a UN conference on a Palestinian state chaired by France and Saudi Arabia. Then came Israel’s attack on Iran. ‘In the blink of an eye,’ Muhammad Shehada, a Palestinian analyst based in Copenhagen, told me, ‘all of it was cancelled. My email was flooded with announcements of events that had been called ...”