“... allowed him to follow them all through.His friends and scientific colleagues John Herschel and David Brewster pressed Talbot to focus for long enough to publish his findings. ‘I have often wondered,’ Herschel wrote to him in 1833, ‘that being, as I am aware you are, in possession of a number of curious & interesting things in optical science and ...”

“... Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...”

“... by August 1831. From there it reached the German ports and travelled on to England, Ireland and France. This first incidence of cholera in Europe, with its horrible symptoms of constant diarrhoea and vomiting, is the novel pandemic that haunts Middlemarch. ‘All the world is in apprehension about the cholera pestilence, which, indeed, seems advancing ...”

“... purchase with the advent of national accounting surveys, first in England around 1700 and later in France. In 1791 Antoine Lavoisier produced estimates of France’s income and wealth and, as Piketty points out with a hint of republican pride, ‘the new tax system established after the Revolution, which ended the privileges ...”

“... study of the Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost, and Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated. David Van Reybrouck’s enormous history is the latest addition to this literature. Van Reybrouck is a Dutch-speaking Belgian journalist whose father was working as an electrical engineer in Katanga at the time of Moïse Tshombe’s secessionist uprising in ...”

“... controversy by whose lurid light his subsequent work was prejudged and has been judged ever since. David Womersley – now Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford – stands at the head of those scholars who try to situate Gibbon in his 18th-century context, thus raising and trying to answer many questions, of which that just framed is central to the ...”

“... 1972 winner, John Berger, in denouncing capitalism and Booker’s treatment of Guyanese workers. David Lean optioned the novel a year later, and though the project came to nothing, Farrell found himself in funds for the first time in his life. After finishing The Singapore Grip in his two-room flat in South Kensington, he bought a cottage on the coast of ...”

“... Trade Organisation in Geneva, which promotes global free trade and an end to protectionism’. Or France and Russia, ‘the biggest trashtalkers in the world, always trying to make up for their weaknesses by giving everybody a lot of lip, especially Washington’. Even deeper in the doodoo are countries like North Korea, Afghanistan, Sudan and Iran. And ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are given added heft by the inquiry’s failure to be persuaded by Blair and Straw’s claim that France was to blame ‘for the “impasse” in the UN’, and by its blunt rejection of the idea that the UK had upheld the authority of the Security Council. Rather, ‘in the absence of a majority in support of military action, we consider that the UK was, in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... atolls had contributed to a widespread scepticism about the bomb. In 1984, the new prime minister, David Lange, announced that he would make the country a nuclear-free zone – a policy hated by the US but popular, then as now, in New Zealand. When New Zealand began to refuse permission for nuclear-powered ships to enter its ports, the US suspended New Zealand ...”