“... for birds and nature, and for Loriod, his wife and musical collaborator.Olivier​ Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born on 10 December 1908 in Avignon. His father was a schoolteacher, his mother a poet. He spent his early years in Grenoble before moving with his family to Paris in 1919, when his father, Pierre, was hired to run a lycée in the Marais. The ...”

“... Jean de Dieu, 11, was curled up, a ball of flesh and blood, the look in his eyes was a glance from nowhere … without vision; Marie-Ange, aged nine, was propped up against a tree trunk … her legs apart, and she was covered in excrement, sperm and blood … in her mouth was a penis, cut with a machete, that of her father … nearby in a ditch with stinking water were four bodies, cut up, piled up, their parents and older brothers ...”

“... France, Italy and Britain have persisted with post-imperial ‘pompous behaviour’, but have de facto become the playthings of the great powers – including Putin’s Russia. So what is to be done? Verhofstadt is an unabashed centraliser. He thinks that having a large number of spread-out institutions (with, he might have added, incomprehensible ...”

“... studies. Six years later she published Réinventer la tradition: Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance, a study of the diplomat and thinker Alexander Sturdza – father a Romanian boyar, mother a Phanariot Greek – in the era of the European Restoration.2Secretary in his twenties to Ioannis Capodistrias, Alexander I’s Greek envoy to the ...”

“... and politics based on the grand tradition of Machiavelli, Smith, Constant, Ricardo, Hegel, Marx, de Tocqueville, Weber and so on. My department had a subsection called Political Theory, which was usually taught by a European scholar and whose range extended from Plato to Marx, but included no Americans. The second factor is that Americans are not naturally ...”

“... characters – Aaron Burr and the Emperor Julian – as well as in his satires. In Burr, Charles Schuyler, a character invented by Vidal to be this vice president’s biographer, says his subject is ‘a man of perfect charm and fascination. A monster, in short.’ Not unlike the novel’s author. ‘I suspect Cromwell was right,’ Vice President ...”

“... as Washington saw it, was to forestall the development of an independent European military force. Charles Bohlen, US ambassador to France in the 1960s, warned the then secretary of state, Dean Rusk, that de Gaulle ‘envisaged the emergence of Europe after the war as a third power centre in the world’. Bohlen was ...”

“... an MIT fraternity had the idea of initiating new members by making them measure a bridge over the Charles River connecting the Cambridge campus with Boston. Crossing the bridge was often a wet, windy and unpleasant business and it was thought that students returning at night from downtown would like to know, by visible marks and with some precision, how far ...”

“... that Britain would be little better than a Trojan horse for American domination of Europe, de Gaulle vetoed the application in January 1963.The following year, Labour came to power in London. Before his death, Hugh Gaitskell had rallied the party to vigorous opposition to British entry into the EEC, arguing that it would mean the end of a thousand ...”

“... thought. In 1999 van Middelaar published the result of his labours in the Netherlands, Politicide: De moord op de politiek in de Franse filosofie (‘Politicide: The Murder of Politics in French Philosophy’). Perhaps advised that this penny-dreadful note might not go down well in ...”

“... his barely cold cadaver. At five o’clock in the afternoon of Monday, 9 October 1967, a las cinco de la tarde, Guevara’s body, on a stretcher strapped to the landing rails of a helicopter, arrived in the Bolivian hill town of Vallegrande. He had been shot some four hours earlier, on the orders – we were to discover much later – of the High Command of ...”

“... there came to mind a scene from a film of my childhood. It was in Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh. Bligh orders a member of the crew to be given a hundred lashes for some offence. After sixty or so, a mate comes to him and says the man is dead. ‘I ordered 100 lashes,’ Laughton says, ‘and it will be 100.’ Pour ...”

“... scale and gave her name to the modified milk bottle in which donated blood was stored. Another, Charles Drew, Columbia’s first African American medical graduate, built the infrastructure for plasma collection in the US for shipment to the various theatres of war. At a time when black blood was acceptable only when specifically labelled pint by pint, and ...”