“... into Savoy to kidnap Mandrin, despite the possible diplomatic ramifications. On the evening of 10 May 1755, a French officer ordered his men to take off their uniforms and blacken their faces, then led them across the Guiers river into Savoy. They found Mandrin peacefully asleep in the château de Rochefort, threw him, still in a nightdress, into a cart, and ...”

“... a useful and up-to-date survey. He reminds us that Sappho’s poems were songs, and that while we may have regrettably few of their words, their musical accompaniment on the lyre is entirely lost. He is sensible and wisely not too specific about the precise nature of Sappho’s undoubted homoeroticism, seeing it as by no means incompatible with heterosexual ...”

“... had value – if there were still ears to hear – his music would be … just music.Shostakovich may have said something like this, but it’s not Power that put ‘history’ (the artist’s struggle) and ‘biography’ in his music, but Shostakovich himself. Take that away, and a lot of his appeal to audiences, both Russian and Western, would ...”

“... well with a doomed last stand. Figures for wounded civilians in Mosul over the last three months may well exceed those for East Aleppo over the same period. This is partly because ten times as many people have been caught up in the fighting in Mosul, whose population according to the UN is 1.2 million; 116,000 civilians were evacuated from East Aleppo. Of ...”

“... lately because his recent memoirs, Winter Journal (2012) and Report from the Interior (2013), may startle fans of his writing with their formlessness and clutter, ham-handed lyricism and epic egotism. My fear, picking up 4321, was that it had been written by the imprudent, tone-deaf Auster of those two books, rather than by the one I reluctantly, thornily ...”

“... renown, he needed to emerge as the victor of that day’s clash of the titans. The world at large may have believed that the Newtonian order had been overturned and that from now on everything was ‘relative’, but there were many who were still sceptical of the implications of relativity, not only philosophers but scientists too, among them even some of ...”

“... almost parodically English figure whose output includes a cultural history of polar exploration (I May Be Some Time, 1996), a memoir of childhood reading (The Child that Books Built, 2002), a study of various unsung successes of postwar British science (Backroom Boys, 2003) and a non-fiction novel that unpacks the story of Soviet economics (Red ...”

“... FTO, leads to just a 3kg weight difference – the suggestion here is that environmental factors may be more significant than genetics in determining obesity. Douglas’s study of 1946 and Golding’s of 1991 have been primarily interested in medical data; they have been funded largely, if patchily, by the Medical Research Council. The 1958 and 1970 cohort ...”

“... the edge into madness, but this is rather like claiming that winning the Republican nomination may have pushed Donald Trump over the edge into egoism. It cannot, however, have helped, not least because the earl was a man with a keen sense of his own social position, easily offended if others seemed less than respectful of his title. If Portsmouth were to ...”

“... roistering virility, and made it his mission to bring it back. This fixation on manliness may have had something to do with a lurking uncertainty about his own sexuality, dating from his childhood. He wrote in his autobiography of ‘the disgrace of my schooldays [that] has clung to me all through life’ and linked it to his failure to earn the ...”

“... of British television as a platform for republican propaganda, the pithiest summary of its record may have come from the unionist politician Jeffrey Donaldson in 1993: ‘Sinn Féin do get a fairly bad press. You get the occasional documentary from Channel 4 which we would argue is not helpful in that at times it tries to present Sinn Féin as a rational ...”

“... least a patrician unease about the growing Jewish-American influence on US Middle East policy – may have played into foreign service Arabism too.It’s also important to remember the missionary tradition from which many US Middle East experts emerged – a tradition that often involved respect and even admiration for Arab culture. Yes, American missionaries ...”

“... safeguards a new Massanello might arise, who, ‘laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented … and may sweep away the liberties of the continent’. Paine was referring to a 17th-century Neapolitan fisherman who had roused the masses to seize control of the ...”

“... What​ you can paint depends on what you are allowed to see, which may be controlled by regulation or social convention. So, for instance, at the Paris Opéra in the 1870s, women were not under any circumstances permitted to sit in the orchestre. And they could only sit in the parterre, or rear stalls, if accompanied by a man ...”

“... to murder, and numerous counts of arson, kidnapping and assault. Haggarty was released in May 2018, after four months’ imprisonment. Leahy picks out the case of Denis Donaldson, a member of Sinn Féin who was recruited as an informer by the RUC Special Branch. He was arrested in 2002 by the PSNI (which had replaced the RUC the year before) for ...”