“... he first read Marx. A Francophile in his adolescence, Stedman Jones had worked in Paris for Agence France-Presse before starting at Oxford. Back in England, he fell in with the group coalescing around the New Left Review, and by 1965 was on its editorial board under Perry Anderson. While their elders on the left – the generation of E.P. Thompson and ...”

“... United Kingdom, Madagascar) and archipelagic states (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines). David Bosco opens his account of ocean governance with the question of the Senkaku Islands, eight uninhabited rocks between Taiwan and Okinawa which are in themselves no good to anyone but are nonetheless bitterly contested. Under US occupation from 1945, when ...”

“... I recall discovering, in a bundle belonging to my wife’s family in the Corrèze in Central France, a letter dated July 1789 which talked of the weather, the forthcoming harvest and various family illnesses, and never once mentioned events far away in Paris. In Gerhardie’s novel Futility, the Revolution of 1917 (which he had witnessed) is merely a ...”

“... conference on refugees in 1936 and careful to make no commitments at a similar conference in France two years later. A pattern began to emerge in the Irish handling of the refugee problem. The Department of Justice was inflexible and would only bend under direct pressure from the Taoiseach’s office, and the Taoiseach’s office dealt only with cases ...”

“... fortunate’ that the ‘poets who got badly involved in the war were all infantrymen in France’. Living in an environment where around half of one’s friends were slaughtered by snipers, mortars and machine guns is an odd form of good fortune; but by describing it this way Graves acknowledged how deeply being a part of mechanised and impersonal ...”

“... for his own psychic traumas. In this reading Delany is following Brandt’s earlier critics, David Mellor and Ian Jeffrey, who identified in Brandt’s photographs coded expressions of his disturbed psyche. They contain what Delany identifies as ‘symbols and obsessions peculiar to himself’.Ever since Brandt became the focus of academic study in the ...”

“... has come to a head faster than expected as a result of the Scottish independence referendum and David Cameron’s political ambition. Labour has (or had) an electoral interest in keeping Scotland in the Union. The Conservatives do not. Their loyalty to the United Kingdom is sentimental, not electoral. The practical argument against Scottish independence was ...”

“... prince, has been slipping. The woman modern scholarship gives us has been neatly summed up by David Cannadine: ‘A workaday regnant queen, shorn of her glitter and her gold, her glamour and her greatness, with a false face, a disturbed psyche, a heart of stone, a barren womb and feet of clay; and as such a woman trying to do a man’s job, but not always ...”

“... deeply embedded in the conflicts of regional interest of a country more than twice the size of France. The differences were acute between the peoples of the High Plateau, chiefly Ovimbundu isolated in the far interior, and those of the Atlantic seaboard and its ports, which traded with Europe. In 1861 the Governor-General, Calheiros e Menezes, had remarked ...”

“... the 17th century that would challenge what she and her friends saw as the Tory version supplied by David Hume. The first volume was an immediate bestseller when it appeared in 1763, and so to a lesser extent were its four successors which were all published before 1773. Insisting on and obtaining what was then the quite extraordinary sum of £1000 per ...”

“... the one person Genghiz had feared and respected.) Kitbuga may have been inspired to try playing David at Goliath’s Spring: at any rate he attacked the Sultan (who inspired his own soldiers with the cry of ‘O Islam’) without the usual Mongol craft and precaution, and lost his army and his life. Had Hulagu been able to return he would certainly have ...”

“... away from the eyes of the international community. The ‘autonomy’ envisaged by the Camp David agreements is unlikely to extend beyond garbage collection. Ostensibly Two Minutes over Baghdad is a True Life Adventure Story in the ‘Entebbe’ tradition, in which an author trades his skills as a publicist against ‘inside’ information supplied by ...”

“... still bandaged, back into the line; he was captured, sentenced to death, and finally released into France. Everything that he has to say is interesting, whether about how much he was paid (he’d expected nothing) and what he did with it (gave it to the war effort, there being nothing to spend it on), or about the horrors of battle. He describes unforgettably ...”

“... hero’s refusal to meet his mother at a victory dinner; the arm’s-length relations with his son David, whom he temporarily disinherited after his divorce (the first in the family); the decision to cut his brother Brian’s wedding and go to a football match instead; and other incidents showing a perverse insensitivity. The Princesse de Merode, whose chateau ...”

“... of US debt. The deal on offer to the Republicans was described by the conservative commentator David Brooks as ‘the deal of the century’, offering ‘trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases’: A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth ...”