“... saw a poster facing me. Executed in yellow and black, it was a combined logo featuring the Star of David, the Islamic star and crescent, the Roman Catholic cross and the more elaborate cruciform of the Serbian and Bosnian Orthodox. Gens una summus,read the superscription. ‘We are one people’. Here, rendered in iconographic terms, was the defiant remnant of ...”

“... travelling there, and if he went anywhere outside Italy, it is more likely to have been Southern France. Furthermore, Antonello used oil paint in a way that would have horrified Van Eyck. If you scrutinise a painting by Antonello under the microscope, it begins to dissolve before your eyes. Although he appears to have painted every detail, in fact his ...”

“... himself ‘entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly’. Kennedy said that David Cecil’s biography of Lord Melbourne, which depicted young aristocrats having a good time while performing heroic feats in the service of Queen and country, was one of his favourite books. When Kennedy was about to run for the Senate, according to ...”

“... Pilgrimage of Grace (1996) and The Defeat of the Pilgrimage of Grace (1999), which he wrote with David Bownes. But to say that Hoyle shares with other historians what Bishop Sheppard of Liverpool called a bias, if not towards the poor then towards the people, a trendy bias, is not to say that he is wrong, or even that his history is prejudicial. On the ...”

“... are in keeping with what would be a cool, and lifelong, observational stance. When he returned to France, Cartier-Bresson tried to work in the cinema, but both Buñuel and Pabst turned him down. Jean Renoir, however, took him under his wing and Cartier-Bresson assisted him until events in Spain forced him to take up his Leica again in 1936. He didn’t cover ...”

“... demanding notion of corruption’. The diamond snuffbox that Benjamin Franklin brought back from France, a present from Louis XVI, troubled Congress: a gift wasn’t necessarily a bribe, but it could become one. Laws governing how much money individuals and organisations could give to politicians were prophylactics, designed – however imperfectly – to ...”

“... 16th arrondissement and walked a block, he was charmed by the fen-like view down the rue Félicien-David. His piece appeared a day or so later in L’Intransigeant, by which time people were comparing the streets of the city, dotted with dinghies and skiffs, to the waterways of Venice, but Apollinaire was reminded of a visit to Dordrecht. He recalled a small ...”

“... Camp Ashraf after the invasion came away convinced that the group could be a useful ally. General David Phillips, a military policeman who spent time there in 2004, argues that the MEK is no more a cult than the US marines: in both organisations you have to wear a uniform, obey orders and follow rituals that seem bizarre to the uninitiated. Positive feelings ...”

“... to Newton, had its beginnings about 1125 BC among the Egyptians, followed by the Jews under King David in 1059, and then the Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians (and no doubt the Chinese and the Americans too, though Newton didn’t mention them). But the main focus of Newton’s efforts was the Greeks. He dated the beginning of their entry into ...”

“... from the central fact that Gaddafi was overthrown by military intervention by the US, Britain and France. There is nothing surprising about all this. Public appearances by Western leaders with smiling children or cheering soldiers are invariably contrived to show them to television viewers in a sympathetic light. Why shouldn’t Arab rebels have the same ...”

“... Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other ...”

“... Israel, even among audiences that one would have expected to be far more critical – the left in France, the Italian Communist Party. Most important was the change within American Jewry, which became blindly, callously pro-Israel only after this war. Before 1967, Immanuel Wallerstein writes in the Hebrew journal Mita’am, ‘the Zionists presented the state ...”

“... man whose sole achievement lies in the sphere of the fanciful. Whereas in places like Germany and France people still tend to drop to their knees before sages with white beards.This is gross, but not different in substance from what Elizabeth Costello’s sister, a nun in Africa, tells her about the value of literature: ‘I do not need to consult novels to ...”

“... chieftains, brought to London to ratify a colonial treaty, were taken to a performance in 1710. David Garrick, reviving the play in the 1740s, played Macbeth in the modern red coat of a Georgian general, so that he looked quite like the Duke of Cumberland, known after his treatment of prisoners taken at Culloden as the Butcher of the Scots. The play only ...”

“... on existentialism and phenomenology edited by R.D. Laing, complete with a eulogistic preface by David Cooper (the South African-born psychiatrist who coined the term ‘anti-psychiatry’). But readers who have to rely on an English translation have had to wait almost four decades to get their hands on a complete version. In important respects the new ...”