“... Court. The US, having little need for the UN, is sceptical of its institutions, unlike Britain and France, who, by promoting the UN’s role, contrive to emphasise their own importance on the world stage. In relation to Yugoslavia, however, the idea of a UN Tribunal allowed the US to appear to be throwing itself into the fray against the warmongers without ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Arran, arrived in England from the Continent. The phrase reads that if Mary (then living in France) did not accept what Cecil considered a reasonable solution to the Scottish revolt, ‘then humbly they [the Scottish Parliament] may commit the governaunce thereof to the next heir of the crown’ – effectively Arran. Cecil’s acceptance of the power ...”

“... put to flight the emperors of both East and West on the same day. What have we to fear from King David and ‘his half-naked natives’?If Walter Espec did say anything of this sort, his words wouldn’t have meant much to his English levies. Some of it is simply false, such as the same-day defeat of both emperors (the events were in fact two years apart, in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... political structures and means of debating them. The present volume takes us to Italy and Spain, France and England, the Netherlands and Germany, but not to Catholic, let alone Orthodox, Eastern ‘Europe’, or into the vigorous intellectual life of Islam or the East Asian ecumene, where ‘politics’ certainly existed and were theologically or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the post-war order which swathes the whole of Northern Europe and extends imperfectly into France and northern Italy. We are also describing an era which may be ending. Certainly full employment is no more. And Keynesianism is out of fashion. At the same time, there is in most countries, not merely in Britain, a more specific ‘crisis of the Welfare ...”

“... beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the distressed. Sterne assured his readers that his purpose in A Sentimental Journey (1768) ‘was to teach us to love the world and our fellow ...”