“... the Americans, but there was no more a ‘special relationship’ with the US than there was with France. Britain had entered the war as a great imperial power, and Churchill was determined that it should emerge from it at least as great, a benign world policeman. As it turned out, however, Britain’s use of the Bomb on Germany had the opposite effect. Like ...”

“... exes are a hard-publishing lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his ...”

“... appeared in 2013. The last chapter of the book, based on nine years of research by its authors, David Shields and Shane Salerno, claimed that at least five books were finished when Salinger died: a collection of Glass stories, a book about the Indian philosophical-religious tradition of Vedanta, a novel about Salinger’s strange marriage to a German woman ...”

“... as William Empson did in the introduction to the selection of Coleridge’s poems he edited with David Pirie: ‘Coleridge wrote only a few very good poems.’ Debate has turned essentially on the question of which those poems were. Defending the edition he was by then at work on, Mays outlined in a 1996 lecture what he meant by his title, ‘Coleridge’s ...”

“... in Conakry, capital of the neighbouring Republic of Guinea, which had become independent from France in 1958. Here, with the blessing of the Guinean president, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Cabral set up the headquarters of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Viriato da Cruz and Andrade had also made their way to Conakry in ...”

“... do like reading other women, and seeing them properly recognised for their work.But it’s also, David Runciman reckons on his Talking Politics podcast, to do with the eventfulness of Arendt’s life, which is why Ken Krimstein’s comic-book biography of 2018 is structured around our heroine’s ‘Three Escapes’. Arendt did not arrive in the US until ...”

“... In France​ , Chris Kraus wrote in an essay from 2003, there exists ‘a formal/ informal structure for the perpetuation of a dead artist’s work’ that gets called ‘the Society of Friends’. The friends gather up the artist’s work, plans, notebooks and so on and write and elicit tributes, then publish the lot in a book called the ‘Cahiers’, maybe at their own expense ...”

“... not even in the top 40. A decade later, Girard’s theory is still relatively little known outside France and California. But the theory is not difficult to summarise, for his several books – notably Violence and the Sacred, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and The Scapegoat – develop only a single argument. Social order, he suggests, is ...”

“... that new safety controls must reduce efficiency is contestable. This view seems to be shared by David Davies, President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, in his recently published assessment of train protection systems, made in the wake of the Ladbroke Grove crash. ‘ETCS level 3,’ he writes, ‘is the best way ahead: it can offer increased line ...”

“... where the main influence on population change was death, and to a lesser degree with that of France, where fertility combined with mortality as instruments of change. In an indirect way, this work adds an element of explanation to the problem of why it was in England that the Industrial Revolution took place. Clearly pre-industrial England had a ...”

“... worth going a little into the general question of why Lowland Scots, as different in pedigree as David Daiches, the film-maker Bill Douglas, Jimmy Boyle and Anne Smith, should be so determined to rake over and publicly display their childhoods (all more or less deprived childhoods, though in Daiches’ case less so from poverty than from an austerely Judaist ...”

“... risks) of hypnosis and the nature of the hypnotic state, moves elegantly from an account of one of France’s more sordid murders, where the murderess claimed to be acting on hypnotic suggestion, to a thoroughly compelling account of the intellectual, social, political and sexual climate of late 19th-century France, and of ...”

“... were incapable of launching until they had expanded the Luftwaffe and captured forward bases in France and the Low Countries in the following year. Satellite reconnaissance of the kind we now take for granted would have dispelled much of Whitehall’s ignorance in 1939, just as it would have provided unmistakable warning of the surprise attacks launched by ...”

“... new planet, and these were developed independently by Adams in Cambridge (1845) and Le Verrier in France (1846), the former failing to publish, the latter bemoaning the reluctance of astronomers to test his prediction. If the hypothetical planet was only perfunctorily chased in England, it seems (according to a recent study by Robert W. Smith) that this was ...”

“... structure founded by Great Britain’s defeat of the French Revolution. The scholarship of David Cannadine and Linda Colley has shown how this was done and how vital the monarchy was to the process. The rejigged royal institution was the mechanism for weening an unruly, half-revolutionary people away from its own past. The defeat of ...”