“... Between them​ France and Britain had more than 450 million imperial subjects at the start of World War One. Germany, despite the geographical size of its African acquisitions, had fewer than 20 million. All three empires threw colonial manpower into the conflict, in Africa, Anatolia, the Middle East and Europe. In Britain, as in Germany, there was strong resistance to the idea of African contingents bearing arms on European soil ...”

“... boring Arsenal. Even when they won, they were losers.In 1989, while coaching Monaco, Wenger met David Dein, the Arsenal vice chairman. Wenger went to an Arsenal match and after the game shared a cigarette with a friend of Barbara Dein, David’s wife. He was invited to their house in Totteridge, North London, for supper ...”

“... where such things are more likely to occur. (Two modern editions of the Requiem – those of David Wulstan and Bruno Turner – try to correct the offending octaves in the Benedictus but in doing so introduce two sets of consecutive fifths. It would have been better to leave Victoria with his momentary slip, as Rees does in his new online edition of the ...”

“... few English women authors are known by name – among them Kempe, the 12th-century poet Marie de France and the sublime Julian of Norwich – others may lurk behind the anonymous female-voiced lyrics in Old and Middle English. Wellesley devotes a few intriguing pages to a 15th-century Welsh-language poet, Gwerful Mechain, whose diverse oeuvre ranges from ...”

“... He travelled – ironically for the dedicated Francophobe of the Syrian dispute – throughout France, first as brass-rubber, then as a student of fortifications, displaying a certain scholarly ruthlessness in those pursuits. The Oxford first in History, accomplished with the guidance of David Hogarth, later a senior ...”

“... the contorted oaks and blasted trunks of the great Romantic – and Christian – painter, Caspar David Friedrich, and the drawings of his lesser contemporaries such as the illustrator of fairy-tales, Moritz von Schwind. There are enigmatic cherubim lurking in the vegetation, and Poe-like ravens and other birds of ill omen in the branches; the sulphurous ...”

“... his closest to recent studies in the politics of literature by British literary historians such as David Norbrook and Jonathan Dollimore. These essays, which originated as lectures, are certainly dazzling performances. To historians like myself, what is most impressive about them is not the attention to historical context, which we have been trained to ...”

“... for military staffs to prepare war plans, or for governments to hint at the use of military force. David Spring shows that Russian leaders knew they had good political, financial, military and social reasons to avoid war, and that their hesitant moves towards army mobilisation were intended only to underscore a firm diplomatic stand, and to deter. The French ...”

“... with its stable marriages, television sets and cartons of milk. One thinks of Garrison Keillor, David Leavitt, and John Updike, whose most luminous descriptions are located in ‘the post-pill paradise’ of pleasure, estrangement and divorce. Thus the ‘normal’, whether a word, a category or a quality, loses its Larkinesque dullness and takes on an ...”

“... of course highly topical. The publication of Aristocrats has more or less coincided with that of David Cannadine’s Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain, which follows some of the themes of his earlier book, Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. Tillyard’s modishly-titled contribution is an enormous account of four ...”

“... and left-wing views. They can unite on racial issues, while differing sharply on others. In France, socialists and Communists have recently demonstrated that they can be as racist as anyone on the far right. And people in Britain who belong to racial minorities do not share a single set of left-wing views: they may all be opposed to racism, but they ...”

“... which Macdonald sets his scene, Brendel had published his History of Music in Italy, Germany and France, a work which already in this first of several editions promotes the idea of a strong progressive line in German music. Brendel identified a new tendency arising out of Beethoven, initially in the piano music of Schumann, and particularly ...”

“... than emphasise the physique, didn’t help. The fashion Henrietta Maria brought with her from France was for an amorphous shape with a loose-laced bodice – a departure from the tightly corseted, inverted triangular numbers favoured by the Tudors and Elizabethans. When Holbein drew Cecily Heron, Thomas More’s third and youngest daughter, during her ...”

“... living in Mallorca in the second. In the first she has escaped the round-ups of Jews in Occupied France, and kills herself in Milan much later. In the second she is not Jewish, and what she has survived is a raffish 1960s youth which involved, among other things, a little larceny and a little prostitution, and hanging out with Peter Rachman in London. The ...”

“... to be added to spore suspensions to stop them clumping when they are prepared and dried, but as David Henderson from Porton Down said in 1952, in a journal to be found in any medical school library, ‘fortunately many substances added to the suspension will prevent clumping. The simplest and most effective that has been found is sodium alginate used in ...”