“... The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing David Copperfield’s opening speculation whether he would turn out the hero of his own life story. The object of this is to characterise the young Olivier as a Dickens child, a version of David, and his father, the widowed ...”

“... reinforced by a misunderstanding of the comments of a French critic on an episode in Sarah’s David Simple; and on the freewheeling appeals to unnamed psychologists, already noticed. The first item is the only one involving the barest appearance of a biographical fact. After their mother died, Henry and the other children lived in the care of their ...”

“... craft to folk culture, Catholic to Protestant everyday life. Heaney met the singer and filmmaker David Hammond in the ‘pre-Troubles, upbeat folk scene Belfast of the mid-1960s’; through him, and after the move to Dublin, he ‘got to know a lot of people, north and south, who were involved with traditional music’, among them Garech Browne of Claddagh ...”

“... as well as making plain that the hands of Jewish decision-makers have not been held out in peace. From a ‘pro-Palestinian’ point of view, his research seems liable to undermine the unity of the Palestinian national movement if only by showing the historic depth of ‘betrayal’ in the Palestinian community in the 1930s and 1940. In 1920 Chaim ...”

“... associated. The purge of 1519, for instance, which has so engrossed Gwyn’s bête noire David Starkey, was ‘a storm in a tea-cup’. The truth, pronounces Gwyn, is that the political world of Wolsey’s ascendancy was ‘not an environment where faction flourished’. It was nevertheless an environment where the Duke of Buckingham got his head ...”

“... Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the killings of two Palestinians. The man, David Axelrod, is not related to Leon Trotsky. A man with the same name, who is a descendant of Trotsky, was questioned briefly by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The arcane character of this item, which was at the top of that day’s menu, might make ...”

“... be attached to his intrepid voyage? Of the natives he first observed in ‘Hispaniola’, as David Brading’s book records, Colombo wrote: ‘They do not have arms and are all naked and with no ability for war and are very cowardly, so that a thousand could not resist three [Castilians] and thus they are fit to be commanded and made to work and to sow ...”

“... the mind. The Stoic scorns those external circumstances of prosperity and affliction, war and peace, health and sickness, praise and blame, which, falling within the province of fortune, are beyond the control of virtue, and are therefore inherently neither good nor evil. In the words of Guillaume du Vair, who after Lipsius was the most influential ...”

“... deity. Camp is no substitute for wit, and Auden wasn’t especially good at either.Luckily for the peace of their various households, they were both sluts. If Auden had been as big a stickler for tidiness as he was for punctuality he would never have had his pinny off. Chester was an inspired cook, though wasted on Auden, who preferred good nursery food and ...”

“... overwhelming desire to re-establish sovereignty over the peninsula, demilitarised since the Camp David Accords. The extent of the Islamists’ deference to the military was made plain when the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood was forced to retract derogatory remarks he had made about the military’s willingness to bend to the wishes of ...”

“... their daughter was born in Paris in 1949. Picasso missed the birth – he was tied up at the World Peace Conference on Communist Party business – but decided that she should be named Paloma, Spanish for ‘dove’.Picasso doted on Paloma, who was sweet and docile, but was less keen on Claude, who had – he was sure – inherited his mother’s ...”

“... a novel, then access becomes a daily means of literary supply, and the task is then to make peace, if you can, between the warring truths that come at you from reality. Lillian invented new and bold ways of doing this by dramatising people’s motives, rather than merely describing them, or by quoting people’s attempts at concealing them. Picture ...”

“... Lega was already in another far-right grouping). The ECR had been the creature of the Tories since David Cameron turned his back on the mainstream conservative European Peoples Party (EPP), historically the driving force of European integration. But Brexit meant that the Conservatives didn’t contest the 2019 European election. This was another stroke of luck ...”

“... to negotiate with anyone but the emperor himself. ‘I understand that you want to negotiate peace, you who call yourself a “deputy”,’ he responded. ‘How shall I respond? You are someone else’s representative, and I am a free and autonomous man answering to none but God.’ Witbooi kept a diary that gives an important African perspective on the ...”

“... get carried away beyond the merits of an originally sound case. Why, he goes on, do writers like David Pryce-Jones want the Parisians to have behaved like the people of Warsaw? It is certainly true that, as a result of their rising, the inhabitants of Warsaw managed to get their city largely razed to the ground. If Hitler had had his way, Paris would have ...”